Simon Knight

Simon Knight grew up in Devon, in the southwest of England, where the habit of questioning everything took root early, driving his parents crazy. His first real job was a management trainee in an aluminum foundry. Before he was trusted with managing anything, he performed nearly every task in the plant: pouring molten metal, shoveling tons of sand, and crawling inside hot castings to weld cracks. He learned that every business is people doing hard things together, and that you understand an organization only when you have seen it from the shop floor up.

His story then took the first of several sharp turns. He played in jazz fu-sion groups, big bands, and classical orchestras, absorbing the discipline of ensemble performance, where listening matters as much as playing. An-other turn followed with three years as a competitive cyclist. He became a regional champion, but his aspirations to ride in the Olympics were dashed when he was excluded from the team because of his age, an early lesson in how arbitrary rules can rewrite even the best-laid plans.

Simon pivoted again, this time into software development, a move that eventually carried him across the Atlantic as the U.S. President of TopSpeed, the compiler and development tools company. From there he moved into Fortune 500 corporations, in roles ranging from enterprise technology ar-chitect to Chief Information Officer. Inside these giants he was exposed to the contradictions of large corporations as bold strategies were undone by ignorance of true reality, and cultures that desperately needed but simulta-neously obstructed change. His responsibilities included leading business transformations and conducting due diligence on acquisitions, work that demanded he look past what organizations said about themselves to what their backstories revealed. Along the way he earned an MBA from Warwick Business School, deepening his understanding of how to manage complex-ity in organizations and markets.

For the past twenty years, Simon has worked as a consultant, gaining experience across a wide range of industries and organizations, from for-profit companies to nonprofits, and from early-stage startups to mature en-terprises. Again and again, he watched capable organizations struggle with the same mission: making informed decisions and effecting real change in complex, messy situations. Business Rewritten was conceived out of those challenges.
Simon remains an active musician and is co-founder of a chamber or-chestra. He lives with his life partner, Carrie KC West, whose books Life Re-written and Money Rewritten inspired the story-based approach of Business Rewritten. They have a home in California, with their dog, Samworf the Brave, and not too far from his son in Los Angeles.