Our Team
Misako Cook
Founder & Principal, Enablement & Transformation
Getting people to actually work differently is the hard part of any organizational change. That holds for AI, and it held for everything that came before it. For the past decade, most of my work has been in organizations where the first reaction to a new tool or a new way of working was resistance.
My longest engagement ran four years and three months with a Fortune 500 client, renewed four times in a row with no lapse.
It started with engineers and business stakeholders who pushed back hard. By the time the project shipped, a user-acceptance phase that had historically been heavy came down to minor cleanup, a first for that client.
Alongside that work, I designed and delivered a two-part enablement program for 120-plus professionals across three operating companies, commissioned by the CIO who led them and run in both Japanese and English.
Working in Japan sharpened how I think about adoption. Risk aversion runs high there. Change of any kind reads as a risk, which makes moving people to new ways of working harder than in a comparable U.S. organization.
The work I am best at sits between what leadership is reaching for and what the people being asked to change are worried about. Both are legitimate. Adoption depends on treating them that way.
I built features for an internal AI product with Claude Code in VS Code, Git, and code review. That work is where I learned where an LLM belongs in a workflow and where it does not. On one product, I kept the LLM for retrieval and citation, and pulled it out of scoring entirely once run-to-run variance proved unacceptable for a compliance use case.
Before consulting, I spent over a decade as a full-stack engineer, then led engineering organizations of 10 to 16, followed by working as a technical project manager at Amazon.
Lei Systems is the practice my co-founder Chris and I built. He owns engineering across hardware, mechanical systems, firmware, cloud, and mobile. I own enablement and transformation. Whichever side a project starts on, the approach is the same: get clear on what the client actually needs and why, then build it.
→ Read my field notes on AI and leadership: https://www.myleisystems.com/blog
720 569 3214
Christopher Cook
Founder & Principal Engineer
Founder of Lei Systems, formerly known as Up&Up in Japan, where we combine deep technical architecture with product-focused leadership to build systems—and teams—that last.
With a career spanning startups to Fortune 100 companies, I’ve led the design and implementation of robust, future-proof solutions across hardware, mechanical systems, firmware, cloud infrastructure, and mobile platforms.
My work consistently emphasizes adaptability, scalability, and thoughtful engineering over short-term fixes.
Grounded in Agile practices and test-driven development, I take pride not only in what I build, but in how it’s built—through mentorship, collaboration, and a relentless commitment to quality.
I believe the best systems are elegant under the hood, resilient in the real world, and empowering for the people who create them.
720 569 2000
