Enterprise and industry-wide performance and change

  •  Acknowledged among the world’s leading management thinkers and consultants

  • Cited in High Impact Consulting for having the number one impact of all consulting efforts described

  • Have worked with hundreds of organizations from Fortune 500 to start-ups across more than 60 industries and fields in the private, government and non-profit sectors

  • Architect of the principles and methods of Challenge-Centric, Performance-Driven Change (TM) that guide leaders to drive innovation, strategy, capacity-building, and growth in enterprises confronting profound change

  • Co-founder and architect of Media Transformation Challenge program at Poynter (which ran as the Sulzberger Program at Columbia from 2007 to 2018)

  • Architect of Table Stakes programs in the US (Major Metro; UNC Regional; Poynter; ASU Table Stakes for Local TV; and, Gannett/McClatchy) as well as Table Stakes Europe — programs in which hundreds of news organizations have moved toward journalistic and financial sustainability through shifting journalism to an audiences-first, reader revenue approach

  • Lead author of Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting into the Game of News, a manual that guides news enterprises in the key strategic steps needed for journalistic and financial sustainability

  • Co-founder with Google News Initiative, LION Publishers and UNC of the Oasis project aimed at helping news entrepreneurs find success

  • Lead architect of NeighborWorks America’s widely-celebrated Achieving Excellence program as well as similar programs in Virginia, Florida, Oregon, Massachusetts, Appalachia, and Arizona: all of which have guided hundreds of affordable housing and anti-poverty groups to improve the dignity and quality of millions of peoples lives through increasing the innovation, impact and sustainability of their field

  • Founding Board member of NextStep and strategy advisor to ROC USA — two non-profit groups who have revolutionized the use of high quality manufactured housing as a crucial solution to affordable housing while also shifting and upgrading the quality of private sector manufactured housing

  • Architect of the Georgia’ state government’s ELDP program that ran for three years and produced significant innovation and change in dozens of Georgia state agencies and departments

  • Co-author of The Wisdom of Teams and The Discipline of Teams, books used by millions of people the world over. When Wisdom was published in 1993, Business Week hailed it as “the essential building block of the organization of the future.” More than twenty years later, Forbes credited Wisdom with making teams a essential part of the managerial playbook.

  • Author of Make Success Measurable and Taking Charge of Change -- books praised for using performance to drive change in a dynamic world

  • As a McKinsey & Company partner and co-founder of the McKinsey worldwide organization performance practice, created the “horizontal organization” which Fortune called “the model for the next fifty years”

  • Former Chairman of Board of Directors of Rapid Result Institute, now RE!NSTITUTE, an award-winning non-profit using results-and-performance driven approaches to increase the speed and impact of social and economic development throughout the world

Education, Social Sector and Technology

  • As Board member and later Board Chair, helped launch and guide SeaChange Capital Partners, an innovative investment bank for the non-profit sector

  • Co-created McKinsey & Company’s Rapid Response Network, one of the world’s earliest and longest lasting innovations in knowledge management

  • Past Chairman of E•Lab, a company that applied cultural anthropology to invent a new approach to behavior-based market research

  • Past Chairman of Foothold Technology, company bringing the benefits of application service technology to the non-profit sector

  • Co-founder of Econ4, a collaboration among economics professors challenging the utility and empirical grounding of neo-liberal, orthodox economics

  • Author of Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored Personal Computing -- widely celebrated as a classic book of the Information Age

  • Author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We in An Age of Me, a social commentary and moral philosophy for the 21st century that has been compared in breadth and depth to Aristotle’s Politics and De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

  • Program strategy and planning for Mi Rialiti — a platform designed to capture actual lived experiences of real people and link those to quantitative data in order to enrich data with a narrative layer needed to make insights come alive

  • Advisor to The Diversity Pledge Institute, an effort aimed at making inclusive journalism real

  • Advisor to URL Media, first ever network of high performing BIPOC owned news groups

  • Taught high school math, physics and chemistry in The Gambia, West Africa and introduced set theory and “new” math to teachers and schools nation-wide

  • Member of Executive Committee Governance Commission that re-architected governance at Yale University

  • Co-author of Sources of The African Past, an innovative, college-level introduction to 19th century African history that puts students and teachers on a level playing field through the use of original sources woven together as narratives

  • Co-invented non-linear arrayed video – patented system and method for creating and viewing fully browse-able video – an entirely new form of education and entertainment