Heather Sherman

About

My first love was biology.

The connections. The alien mitochondria in our cells, powering our lives. The autonomic coupling synchronizing heartbeats. A park's entire landscape changed when wolves were reintroduced, because the deer moved differently, and the rivers changed course, and the willows grew back along the banks. A single flower feeds a bee and in return gets carried somewhere new. One small village in England carried a genetic variation that made them immune to the Black Plague, and centuries later, to HIV. How nature responded to malaria not with a cure but with a negotiation, a cell deformation that offers protection with one allele. How you can still see the shape of Pangea in the way South America fits against Africa's coast.

I loved that it was all connected in ways you couldn't see until you knew where to look. That invisible hand working underneath everything, keeping the balance or breaking it.

The thing I couldn't figure out in college was where I fit into pursuing it. The methodology fascinated me. The application hadn't arrived yet.

The systems. The flows. The triggers. The patterns. The dependencies. The formulas. Suddenly the methodology had somewhere to go. I barely slept. I dreamed in Excel formulas. As fast as my mentor could show me spreadsheets I devoured them, analyzed them, rebuilt them to flow better. I fixed simple ordering to make references automatic. I created formulas that did the work and fed the data forward to the next sheet. When I made a mistake, I analyzed it and updated the sheet so that mistake became structurally impossible. The hunger was greater than my capacity and I didn't care.

I rose fast. Accounting Assistant to Senior Staff Accountant and NetSuite Administrator within a year, building an AR department from nothing, automating most of it, running it alone. The Controller and CFO called me to run automation ideas past me. My mentor once said it was like the company had been careening in a speeding car and I fixed everything I touched as I bounced around inside the vehicle. That felt accurate.

It was like the Queen's Gambit. That small lit space where everything makes sense and you can block out the rest. Building, fixing, maintaining systems and keeping them flowing. That is my ikigai. I go to sleep thinking about automations. I wake up to build the next one.

But an environment is only as healthy as what grows in it.

I watched what happened when the wrong thing went unchecked. Leadership at one company saying openly that they should burn through employees if it meant better profit margins. A CFO whose focus had shifted so far toward numbers that the people generating them became more numbers. I had poured everything into those environments, my health, my sleep, my social life, all of it. And I had seen enough biology to know what was happening. An invasive species growing unchecked doesn't just crowd out what was there. It reshapes the entire ecosystem.

Diversity, balance, interdependence. These are not soft values. They are survival mechanics.

So I stopped waiting for a healthier environment and built one.

ClearStem Systems Consulting exists because I will only work in ecosystems where people are the purpose. Not as a side effect of the mission. As the reason for it. One nonprofit partner is building infrastructure so that families in crisis can access the support they need and begin to break cycles of poverty. Another is an independent studio creating a game that is ambitious and meaningful in looking at living life with honor. I am there with them, and we are building environments where people can grow and thrive.

I bring the same thing to every engagement. Find the root. Fix what's broken. Build something that empowers people. And I only do it in places where the goal is for living things to flourish.

That is applied biology. It just took me a while to find the right ecosystem to practice it in.

By the way, the cat's name is Ferris Mewler. Unfortunately, he is not available for consulting engagements.

I am Heather Sherman, here when you need me.