Michael Cinquino has spent three decades in rooms where how people talked determined what happened next: the deck of a US Navy ship, a conservatory classroom, a portrait studio, a closed-door session of Fortune 70 chief information officers, and a therapy hour.

He enlisted in the Navy at seventeen and spent four years on active duty aboard the USS Detroit, deployed overseas twice, as a surface rescue swimmer. He went straight from the service to school: a BA in acting and directing from DeSales University, then an MFA in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where he trained under William Esper, a protege of Sanford Meisner. That conservatory is built on one premise. Acting is not about words, it is about behavior. You stop planning what you are going to do and start responding to what is actually happening in front of you, moment by moment. Three years of it taught him what it costs a person to perform, and what becomes possible when they stop.

He carried that into the CIO Strategy Exchange, where working alongside its founders put him behind closed doors for a decade with twenty-five chief information officers from Fortune 70 organizations, twice a year, working on the biggest problems facing their companies. He watched the most senior people in American technology talk so that others listened and listen so that others talked. He also watched what happened in the room when they did not.

Today Michael is the creator of the Communication Dynamics Lab and its one-day workshop, How To Talk So People Listen. (And Listen So People Talk). It combines the art of acting with the science of psychology: the techniques the world's greatest stage and screen actors use to captivate an audience, the psychology of why they work, and how to use them in the next meeting, the next one-on-one, and the next hard conversation at home. He has taught communication at the University of New Hampshire's Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics for five semesters, and the workshop has been delivered at BAE Systems, Red Hat, Soho House, Blockchain Capital, Life Sciences Outsourcing, and Lonza.

He is completing a Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Northwestern University and sees patients by telehealth. The acting came first and the psychology came second. He teaches the place where they meet.