About Michael

Michael Cubbage was born at the crest of the post-war baby boom in Philadelphia, growing up in a tightly packed enclave of row houses. It was an era of crowded classrooms and city buses filled beyond capacity. At the time, no one knew what Asperger syndrome was. Michael navigated a society built on rules he wasn’t even aware he was missing.

He went on to win a national championship in high school sports, become the youngest detective in a major city police department, and participate in what many consider the most aggressive policing experiment in U.S. history. Along the way, he worked alongside celebrities, raised a family, and later built a second career inside Fortune 50 companies. He earned three degrees, including an MBA — long before understanding that his Asperger diagnosis would one day explain the perspective driving much of it.

Diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at age 60 while working on Wall Street, Michael began reexamining his life through a different lens. His writing documents that pre-diagnosis journey — how Asperger’s shaped his approach to competition, detective work, institutional systems, and navigating a world designed by and for “normals.”

Through his books, Michael examines what happens when a pattern-oriented mind moves through high-stakes environments — policing, business, and public life — often seeing structures and inconsistencies others miss.

Across policing and business, one pattern became clear: outcomes were rarely determined by policy. They were shaped by how solutions crystallized internally before action. That observation — and the question it raised: how did it happen? — eventually became the foundation for Variation-A.