Michael N. Fineman

What happens when you build the business, achieve the success, become the person everyone else admires, and somewhere along the way lose sight of who you actually are?

Michael Fineman has spent much of his life wrestling with that question.

His story began far from the conventional path to leadership. On his own at 15, Michael found guidance listening to Les Brown on cassette tapes in an old car. Years later, he would find himself sitting across the table from Les, ultimately becoming co-founder of the Les Brown Prodigy Program.

Along the way, Michael built a career spanning corporate sales and marketing, entrepreneurship, consumer brands, speaking, coaching, and leadership development. Today, he works with high-performing leaders confronting a problem success can actually make harder to see: the slow separation between who you are and who you believe you have to be.

Michael calls it Authority Drift.

His latest book, The Authority Drift, explores how achievement, expectations, approval, and seemingly insignificant compromises can quietly pull leaders away from their internal compass.

Michael's work asks successful founders a deceptively uncomfortable question:

Have you built a business and a life that expresses who you are, or have you become the person your success requires you to perform?