About

Photos

Subpages

My new content management system is Ghost. It generally rocks, but its themes don't allow easy subpages to a main page. For that reason, I'm listing them here. (Hey, life's all about choices, right?)

Short Bio

Phil Simon is the world’s leading independent workplace collaboration and technology expert. A sought-after speaker, he has delighted audiences for more than fifteen years. Simon advises companies on how to use technology and has penned 14 books. They include Reimagining Collaboration, Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace, Message Not Received, and The Age of the Platform, and The Nine—each of which has won awards.

Harvard Business Review, CNN, Inc., The New York Times, Wired, NBC, CNBC, Wired, BusinessWeek, and many other prominent media outlets have featured his contributions over the years.

He also runs Racket Publishing. (More on that below.)

Simon holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University.

Longer Bio

I consider myself a business scholar and have penned 14 books:

• The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace (Book IV: The Future of Work) (Racket Publishing, 2023)
• Low-Code/No-Code: Citizen Developers and the Surprising Future of Business Applications (Book III: The Future of Work) (Racket Publishing, 2022)
• Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace (Book II: The Future of Work) (Racket Publishing, 2022)
• Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work (Book I: The Future of Work) (Motion Publishing, 2021)
• Zoom For Dummies (Wiley, 2020)
• Slack For Dummies (Wiley, 2020)
• Analytics: The Agile Way (Wiley, 2017)
• Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It (Wiley, 2015)
• The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions (Wiley, 2014)
• Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data (Wiley, 2013)
• The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business (Motion Publishing, 2011)
• The New Small: How a New Breed of Small Businesses Is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies (Motion Publishing, 2010)
• The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos (Wiley, 2010)
• Why New Systems Fail: An Insider’s Guide to Successful IT Projects (Cengage, 2010).

Long Bio

I attended Carnegie Mellon University and studied Policy and Management with a minor in Political Science. The CMU experience affected me deeply.

In December of 1993, I graduated. Unfortunately, I was clueless a bit unsure about what I wanted to do for a career. I settled in at Sony Electronics as a customer relations rep while I figured things out. I ultimately attended graduate school at Cornell University in August of 1995. For three semesters, I worked as a teaching assistant (TA) in labor economics and collective bargaining. I didn’t know it at the time, but this experience would serve me well down the road. #foreshadowing

During my summer internship in 1996, I began using PeopleSoft, a popular enterprise resource planning system at the time. (Oracle now owns it.) I created reports and answered business questions with ERP data. It didn’t take long for me to learn new reporting applications.

After grad school, I started my brief career in corporate human resources. That wasn’t the best fit for me—a lack of match quality, as economists say. I quickly gravitated to work rooted in technology, data, and systems.

In 1998, I took my first quasi-IT job, traveling extensively to Latin America on a global PeopleSoft project for Merck. During that time, I taught myself advanced Microsoft Excel and Access, Crystal Reports, Structured Query Language (SQL), and a host of other applications. I became adept at manipulating enterprise data and identifying issues with it—something that my Merck colleagues either loved or hated. In the immortal words of Walter White: I liked it. I was good at it.

The next step shouldn’t surprise anyone: I started working as a systems consultant in 2000 for Lawson Software—now part of the behemoth that is Infor. Beyond consulting, I taught software classes to clients and even to some of my colleagues. I decided to hang my own shingle in 2002.

I sit squarely at the intersection of data, technology, business, and communications.

Aside from writing and speaking, today I advise all types of organizations on communication, collaboration, management, data, and technology. Along these lines, I like to think that I’ve been reasonably successful. Over my career, I have cultivated well over 200 clients in a wide variety of industries, including health care, manufacturing, retail, education, telecommunications, and the public sector. I have worked with many organizations that use technology in many different ways–some better than others.

In August of 2016, I joined the faculty at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. I spent four interesting years there. In May of 2020, I decided to return to the independent life. I'm glad I did. More books followed. 

It was time, especially with Zoom For Dummies and Slack For Dummies coming out—and the seeds planted for Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work. 

Racket Publishing

Beyond writing my own books, I help other authors in different capacities via Racket Publishing. As of January 2024, the team and I have published four professional non-fiction books—and I’ve got plans for more.

Largely for branding purposes, I keep the site separate. Plus, one day I may want to sell Racket, as I did with Motion Publishing in 2017.

Disclosure

I’m a big believer in transparency.

All thoughts on this site are mine. I have written many sponsored posts for my clients on this site, but I clearly mark them as such. The same holds true for white papers, webinars, and the like.

If I use AI in a post, I'll clearly indicate as much. I have found it useful to brainstorm post titles, but I don't use it as a primary writing tool.

For Fun

It’s essential for me to keep my mind sharp and my powder dry. My need for cognition is high. I enjoy reading, stand-up comedy, Scrabble, Sudoku, word games, movies, prestige TV, and live concerts. The same holds true with my body. I play tennis, golf, and basketball—some of which not particularly well. I am also into concerts, stand-up comedy, running, HIIT, and weightlifting.