I spent thirty-seven years in business before I understood the thing I now write about: organizations systematically lose their most perceptive people, and they do it while believing they are being fair.
I am the CEO and founder of Oransi, an electric motor technology and air purifier company. Before that I was a senior manager/director at Dell and at Tech Data. Before that I was a Surface Warfare Officer in the Navy and served in the Gulf War. I have founded two companies. Both reached the top one percent of revenue in their category. I have one successful exit.
None of that qualified me to write about perception. What qualified me was watching the same failure repeat across every one of those environments, and eventually noticing that I was part of the mechanism producing it.
What I write about
Business performance. Specifically, why organizations filter out the people they need most and how to fix it.
The Projection Fallacy is at the center of my work. It is the assumption that your read of another person is the truth of that person. It feels like judgment. It operates like measurement. It is neither.
SHIELD is the framework I built to describe what highly perceptive people actually do in organizations that are not built for them, and what changes when the organization stops treating that perception as a problem to manage.
Books
The Perception Revolution (Fast Company Press). Written for the perceptive employee and their manager.
The Projection Fallacy: Why Organizations Exclude the People They Need Most (Fast Company Press, April 2027). Written for the people who design the systems.
Research and affiliations
I am a co-investigator on a funded study of neurodiversity in the workplace, in collaboration with researchers at University of Rochester Simon Business School. I chair the AHAM Air Cleaners Council, serve on an NSF steering committee, and am a YPO alumnus.
Elsewhere
I write daily at peterallenmann.com. I speak at conferences on perception, organizational design, and the cost of hiring for fit.
Originally from Syracuse. Currently in Beacon, New York, still learning where things are.