Leading with Imperfect Feet: How My Disability Enabled Me to Become an Even More Agile Leader - Hardcover

by David Dame (Author)

A bold and personal roadmap showing how embracing imperfection, vulnerability, and bottom-up change creates more adaptive and human organizations ready for today's volatile world.

Leading with Imperfect Feet is a revelation in modern leadership thinking, told through the lived experience of someone who has navigated change his entire life. Born with cerebral palsy, David Dame learned early that progress comes not from waiting for perfect conditions, but from taking imperfect steps, adapting continuously, and welcoming discomfort as the price of growth.

Drawing from decades leading enterprise transformation, building inclusive products, and coaching executives around the world, David offers a refreshing and deeply human approach to leadership. Through powerful storytelling--from learning to walk into the ocean for the first time to redesigning work systems from the bottom up--he illustrates how vulnerability, curiosity, grit, and openness are not soft skills, but the foundation of high-performing organizations.

The book blends personal narrative with actionable leadership insight, demonstrating how embracing flaws, failures, and experimentation enables teams to innovate faster and work with purpose. Using memorable stories like going three years without a washroom break at his first job, hiring his first personal support worker at eighteen, and reshaping product design at Microsoft, David shows why real change starts with seeing barriers as opportunities and people as whole humans.

Perfect for leaders, product makers, change agents, and anyone who wants to build more inclusive and adaptive organizations, Leading with Imperfect Feet challenges readers to rethink what strong leadership looks like -- and to realize that their imperfections may be their greatest competitive advantage.

Author Biography

David Dame is a globally recognized product leader, accessibility champion, and change agent with more than 30 years of experience guiding organizations through complexity and transformation. Born with cerebral palsy, David learned early that progress is built through experimentation, vulnerability, and the grit to keep moving forward one imperfect step at a time.

He has led large-scale enterprise agile transformations, trained hundreds of leaders worldwide, and brought inclusive innovation to life through products like Microsoft's Adaptive Accessories, the Surface Adaptive Kit, and other multimodal technologies that help the world work more equitably. David is also a TEDx speaker whose talk, Sprinting with Cerebral Palsy, has inspired audiences around the world.

Today he serves as Senior Director, Human Centered Design at Microsoft, where he helps shape the next generation of inclusive products by blending user imagination, business strategy, and his lived experience navigating a world not designed for him. His work demonstrates that embracing imperfection is not a compromise - it is a competitive advantage.