What Jared Goldberg Does

Jared Goldberg works with messy reality — people, incentives, media, logistics, and power — and looks for leverage.

His practice is to diagnose how systems actually behave under stress, then design the simplest structure that still holds. The output varies: a strategy, a system map, a workshop, a platform, a piece of writing, or a provocation. The work itself does not.

If you’re looking for a collaborator to pressure-test an idea, diagnose a system, or turn a concept into something that survives contact with reality, you’re in the right place.

Jared Goldberg is a practicing mixed-media artist working across painting, sculpture, sound art, and performative satire.

He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Lethbridge, where he studied under the mentorship of Vancouver-based artist Phillip McCrum and Prince Edward County artist Yvonne Lammerich. His artistic work examines cultural appropriation, system dynamics, economics, and the emerging logic of the metaverse.

Drawing from art history, media theory, and systems thinking, Goldberg uses humor, abstraction, and conceptual framing to interrogate how value, meaning, and power are constructed — and how they move.

Upon graduating in 2001, Goldberg moved to Shanghai, beginning a decade-long immersion in one of the most dynamic systems on the planet. He taught at the Lasalle Shanghai Design Institute, where he learned how to communicate across cultures, motivate diverse groups, and command a room — skills that would later become central to his work inside large organizations.

Living in Shanghai during a period of explosive growth, he witnessed infrastructure, transportation networks, and entire neighborhoods materialize in real time. That experience — watching systems scale at city-level speed — permanently shaped how he understands logistics, incentives, and coordination.

In 2003, Goldberg joined Bestway, a large sporting goods and toy manufacturer outside Shanghai. There, he learned the full product lifecycle end-to-end: discovery, design for mass production, manufacturing, marketing, and merchandising. He oversaw global marketing and product development strategies that helped propel Bestway to a dominant position in Europe, then spun up tactical brands to help retail partners diversify promotions.

During this period, he founded The Innovation Lab, partnering with institutions such as Stanford, Umeå, and Carnegie Mellon. Interns were flown into Shanghai to conduct human-factor research, develop commercially viable products, and test ideas directly against manufacturing reality. The work culminated in global sales launches and large-scale media productions — blending design, research, commerce, and storytelling into a single system.

After returning to North America in 2015, Goldberg briefly joined a Thai meal-kit startup in New Jersey, where he handled media and business development, secured national retail distribution, and negotiated licensing partnerships. The experience reinforced a familiar lesson: strong products are not enough — systems determine outcomes.

In 2016, he joined Loblaw Companies Limited as a product manager, overseeing large consumer portfolios and later moving into digital media infrastructure. His time at Loblaw is best summarized as an MBA earned inside a live system — specializing in data analysis, private label economics, and identifying revenue hiding in plain sight. He later helped research and develop Loblaw Digital’s in-store advertising platform, managing a $30M CapEx rollout across thousands of touchpoints.

In 2024, Goldberg joined Walmart Connect, working on in-store media. There, he studied one of the most disciplined operational cultures in modern retail — a system built around cost clarity, incentive alignment, and behavioral consistency at massive scale.

Looking for a more complex orchestration problem, he joined Canadian Tire in 2025, where he works on in-store media platforms and next-generation retail planning tools. His focus is integrating legacy merchandising, supply chain, and operations teams with modern media systems — translating non-linear insights into frameworks that align with corporate execution while preserving systems-level clarity.

Goldberg’s cognitive profile is often labeled as “ADD” in clinical language. In practice, it’s a set of tradeoffs.

Naturally inclined toward systems-level thinking, this profile can be poorly matched to rigid bureaucratic environments that reward linear workflows and performative consensus. Over time, however, Goldberg has learned how to adapt, translate, and operate effectively inside large corporate systems — while retaining the ability to step outside them to diagnose structural issues others miss.

High pattern sensitivity
He sees structure before surface and connects ideas across domains quickly — often faster than social norms prefer. With experience, he has learned how to pace, translate, and operationalize these insights so they land inside real organizations and produce measurable outcomes.

Low tolerance for bullshit
He struggles with ornamental language, performative work, and systems that reward appearance over outcomes. This makes him ill-suited for politics-as-theatre, but well-suited for clarity, leverage, and execution when incentives matter.

Non-linear thinking
He doesn’t reason in straight lines. He reasons in maps. This is particularly useful when problems are complex, interdependent, and resistant to linear solutions — which most real-world problems are.

Humor as compression
Satire is not a personality quirk. It’s a compression algorithm — a way to collapse complex systems, contradictions, and power dynamics into something immediately legible and actionable.

Obsession with systems, incentives, and edge cases
Less interested in what should work than in what does work — especially under pressure, scale, or human behavior.

This cognitive profile is not optimized for politeness. It is optimized for reality — and adaptable enough to function inside institutions that require translation.

This way of thinking aligns naturally with figures like Marshall McLuhan, Marcel Duchamp, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, George Carlin, and Jeff Koons.

They weren’t “normal.” They were structurally misaligned with the dominant systems of their time — yet deeply effective within them.

That misalignment wasn’t a flaw. It was the signal.

Jared Goldberg’s work sits at the intersection of art, systems, commerce, and media.

Pattern-driven. Outcome-oriented. Humor-laced but serious.

Capable of operating inside large organizations. Most effective when allowed to see beyond them.

If you’re comfortable with ambiguity, curious about incentives, and serious about outcomes, collaboration tends to work well.

Include a clear subject line and the system, the stakes, and what “success” looks like. If you’ve got constraints, include them. Constraints are the fun part.

Email: [email protected]

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