Kintsugi Heroes
John Dwyer · 70 min
A school dropout who left at fourteen to stitch leather goods went on to lead global teams at Microsoft, Nokia, and Amazon — and found his deepest purpose not in technology, but in helping people discover their own strengths.
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John Dwyer left school at fourteen to apprentice as a saddle maker, teaching himself to code on a Commodore 64 in the factory afternoons. That dropout path led him through eighteen years at Microsoft, time at Nokia, and eight and a half years at Amazon Web Services, managing teams across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. A month ago, he stepped away from corporate leadership for good. On day one of unemployment, he is asking a different question than the one that drove him for nearly five decades: not what title comes next, but what work actually matters to him.
In 2010, sitting in Dublin and turning fifty, John recognised something that had been true all along. The technology had never been the point. People were. That realisation shaped everything after it, even when he returned to corporate roles to support his family through his children's college years. He tested his exit strategy by starting an executive coaching business, proved to himself it worked, then went back to earn. Now, with his children independent, he is free to follow what actually gets him out of bed: helping people discover their own strengths, and the intersection between what they love, what they are good at, what the world needs, and what they can be paid for.
John's path to this clarity ran through his transgender daughter's transition, his three years managing diverse teams across cultures in Singapore, and a lifetime of carrying imposter syndrome despite his success. He learned that curiosity, not judgment, is the antidote to fear and bias. He learned that pronouns matter not because the grammar does, but because using them correctly is the difference between harming and empowering another person. He learned that everybody, regardless of their title or credentials, carries self-doubt. And he learned that the hard start he shared with his mother gave him something valuable: the ability to relate to people in struggle, and to believe that everybody can succeed in the right circumstances with the right support.
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Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗