Thought Leadership
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Recent Articles
- Leaders Who Do NOT Self-Examine Themselves Become Insane January 21, 2021
- It Takes a Village to Raise a Leader August 15, 2015
- The Reason Why Great Sailors ARE Made in Rough Waters May 12, 2014
2012 Book of Blogs
Related Links
- Check out It’s Your Business Blues for a high impact memorable corporate teambuilding experience with my band Boomerang.
- I am an Associate Partner with KRW International, a global boutique of senior advisors helping executives build high character leadership capacity and capability to more effectively execute strategy and excel in a changing world.
- I am a senior affiliate with Korn Ferry Pivot Leadership Development providing strategic executive leadership development to large domestic and global companies.
Testimonials
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John partnered with me to establish a ground breaking and intensive development program to build global leadership capabilities in our future executives. Due to the success of this program, now in its third year with plans for continuing, he also worked with us to develop a program for leaders in unique global “transversal” roles to build capabilities to achieve results through influence. Thanks to John’s expertise, practical creativity, engaging facilitation style and ability to understand and challenge our culture he has definitely accelerated the development of our cadre of senior leaders
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Corporate VP, Training and Career Management
Global French-owned Manufacturer
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Over the years John and his associates have developed and facilitated innovative meeting designs connected to a variety of different initiatives including senior leadership forums, planning and educational workshops, and company conferences. He has taken the time to ‘get’ our business and understands what we need, then goes beyond our original ask to produce amazing results. He genuinely cares about us, and helping us move forward. He is a willing, accessible partner. In every instance, he’s exceeded our expectations and won the respect of participants through his engaging and personable style.
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HR Executive
Large Energy Utility
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I have known and worked with John as a professional colleague for many years, and he is a truly unique kind of consultant who invokes his personal style into his professional work. John’s exceptional ability to form strong bonds with his clients is based on his capacity to evoke trust quickly. He does this by understanding and empathizing with a client’s issues and needs, then partnering to chart a way forward that is both practical and innovative. Moreover, he stays the course with clients as they make it happen. His ethics, strong principles, good humor and willingness to confront challenging situations make for an enriching and fun journey for those lucky enough to work with him.
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National Managing Director
International Consulting Firm
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Six months into my new role, I felt it was time to review the focus and direction of our people strategy and HR organization. I engaged John to design and facilitate an efficient and engaging process to identify the key HR levers for competitive advantage within our organization and build an implementation plan including the HR organization design. The process enabled us to make strategic decisions that were informed and that we were confident were the right ones and, most importantly, built the shared commitment of my team. Through his innovative support, experience and disarmingly personable style, he fit right in with the team. And for me, he was a critical sounding board I turned to in helping me think through our people strategy and HR organization.
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Corporate Senior Vice President, HR
Large North American Energy Company
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Our Board was asking us for answers to two questions: How ready are our potential internal CEO succession candidates? And how strong is our future executive officer bench strength? We engaged John and his associates to put together a development focused assessment solution to provide informed perspectives to these questions that we could be confident of. The process that was devised was one of the most effective I have seen in my long career in HR. John shaped best practices in an innovative and efficient manner that drove profound insights for evaluating our CEO and executive candidates. Those participating in this program considered it the most dramatic development experience they had ever been involved in. His personal approach put everyone at ease during the process, and bred additional confidence in the outcomes. The insights and informed points of view were a tremendous asset, and helped us arrive at an accurate and favorable outcome we continue to benefit from today.
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CAO and EVP HR
International Energy Company
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The development of our corporate leadership team in order to meet the opportunity for growth required us to take a more collective leadership approach, mindset and change in behavior and we needed an experienced and trusted advisor to help us. .John and his associate used a data-driven approach, including team psychometrics and interviews, to analyze the current readiness of the team members to take this next step and also gather their ideas for the value added role of the executive team. They used this to design and facilitate a two-day retreat for this cautious group, helping to drive collective accountabilities, team goals and operating principles. Through this process, they were able to significantly deepen the candor amongst the executive team and develop outcomes which are truly owned and committed to by all.
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President & CEO
National Professional Services Firm
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John played a critical role in helping me to transition a number of newly-hired executives on my senior team., He developed an innovative best practice onboarding program which both accelerated their effectiveness into their roles and minimized the transition risks frequently the case in such situations he quickly won the trust of the people involved and his efforts created a smooth transition for everyone.
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National Managing Director
Global Pharmaceutical Company
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As part of the transformation journey we are on to create a high performance culture John and his associates designed and delivered the most impactful leadership development program in our company’s history. So much so, it was featured as one of the key drivers behind our company being named a Top 100 employer. We’ve engaged John repeatedly over the past 10 years to produce innovative best practice learning processes that help leaders transform their behaviour. He is extremely responsive, and takes time to understand issues before he develops solutions. In every case, he has masterfully garnered the respect of our senior executives and leadership throughout the company.
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Executive
Energy Utility
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With a new strategic acquisition we had just doubled the size of our company. It was obvious at that point that it was time to reset our five year growth and that we needed some outside guidance in doing so. John and his associates were our clear choice to help design, lead and facilitate a strategic planning process that would both harness the synergies of the now larger enterprise and also accelerate a needed cultural integration between both companies. His design fostered a collective focus that enabled us to build both relationship and commercial bridges across our businesses and establish a platform for growth. Execution was going to be key to success. John and his associates designed the planning process to engage all of our top leaders in cross-functional teams which accelerated a shared understanding of the strategic choices thus positioning all leaders to quickly move to implementation. In fact, the benefit of this process is still working well for us three years later. With a keen understanding of our challenges, John was able to devise a solution that our leadership teams have extracted lasting value from.
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President & CEO
National Professional Services Firm
