An executive-level servant leader focused on helping businesses succeed by improving organizational leadership, culture, operations, and technology in a way that fosters innovation, transformation, and performance improvement — without compulsion, and from the inside out.
Synonyms: CEO confidant & counselor · second pair of eyes
See also: servant leader · growth strategist · secret weapon for CEOs
If it has to do with people, process, or technology, I've probably done it.
- Business turnarounds and improvement initiatives
- Culture, innovation, and workforce productivity
- Leadership and organizational development
- Process engineering and operations maturity (ITSM/ITIL)
- Enterprise project management (PMO/PPM/OPM3)
- Cloud infrastructure and digital workplaces
- Social intranets and remote team collaboration
It started with a computer from Grandpa Roberts.
I grew up in southern Utah — where a lot of the old western movies were filmed — the sixth of eight children in a small western town. My career testing in high school said I should be a therapist or a teacher. I chose IT instead.
It began when I was newly married and my Grandpa Roberts gave me my first computer. Once I learned to take it apart and put it back together, I got a job supporting computers at a manufacturing company in San Diego. From there I specialized in enterprise document management (Livelink), eventually leading operations for one of the largest installations in North America, at Sprint Corporation.
As I moved into IT leadership, I made a discovery that changed everything: technology alone was never what made a project succeed. Every implementation was really an organizational change initiative in disguise — and it succeeded when the people, the process, and the technology were all handled well, together. I realized I had something unusual: I was a technologist, an organizational developer, and a process improvement specialist in one. That combination is exactly what working beside a CEO requires — the kind of work only a peer executive can do. 2ndCEO is the result.
Sam Roberts
Sam has been an organizational change specialist for 25 years, starting with his father's medical clinic, which he saved from bankruptcy. He reads workforce dynamics, culture, and empowerment the way engineers read systems — and treats them as one.
As an operations improvement specialist, he increased the maturity of service management and delivery processes within one data center more than 900% in two and a half years. He is deeply experienced in the configuration and support of intranet and digital workplace environments — performance, availability, security, and backups included.
Sam is certified in UNIX and ITIL, served as director of a Project Management Office, and holds two degrees: a BA in Information Systems and an MA in Organizational Administration. He founded 2ndCEO to merge leadership, culture, operations, and technology into a single servant-leadership role — the Chief Enabling Officer. His mission: helping CEOs grow their organizations through inside-out transformation.
My practice is intentionally small these days, and I take very few engagements.
How engagements work