The Resumé
Just the facts: my work experience, education and training. (You can also download a printer-friendly PDF, which requires Adobe reader.)
The Elevator Version
Professional
I'm an executive coach, a change management consultant, and a Leadership Coach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. I help individuals find professional fulfillment and develop their leadership and interpersonal skills; I help people work together more effectively as members of a team; and I help companies and nonprofits adapt their management practices and organizational culture to better fit their changing needs. (To learn more, please see what I do, check out my resumé or contact me.)
My work as a coach began after a 15-year career in management, during which I took two years off to earn an MBA at Stanford, and I've helped launch three new organizations. In addition to coaching and change management, I'm particularly interested in the intersection of organizational culture and social technology.
Personal
I've lived in San Francisco since 1990; I'm married to Amy Wright, a recovering corporate attorney-turned-law school librarian; and I'm passionate about listening to music (particularly jazz, but I love punk, blues and bluegrass as well), hiking throughout the Bay Area, and visiting New Orleans whenever possible.
The Full Story
Coaching and Consulting
I launched my executive coaching and change management consulting practice in 2006 after a 15-year career in management, and the following year I began working as a Leadership Coach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB). In addition to my full-time work at Stanford, I maintain a private coaching and consulting practice. Please see what I do, check out my resumé or contact me to learn more.
My primary goal is to help people find greater fulfillment in their work, develop their leadership and interpersonal skills, collaborate more successfully with their colleagues, and improve their overall professional effectiveness. I initially became interested in coaching and change management work during my first stint as an executive director. As the leader of a new organization, I relied heavily on the support of an executive coach--Mary Ann Huckabay, one of my best professors at Stanford--who helped me make the most of my strengths and better understand my shortcomings.
My approach to coaching and change management has been shaped by many influences, but first among them are the writings of Peter Drucker, the opportunity to work with Prof. Carole Robin at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Stanford's Interpersonal
Dynamics class (casually known to students as "Touchy Feely"), which uses the T-group
method developed by Kurt Lewin and the National Training Laboratory
to help participants understand and improve their effectiveness in group settings. I'm a graduate of Stanford's Group Facilitation Training Program and have served as a teaching assistant to Dr. David Bradford in his High Performance Leadership class. I'm also indebted to Joe Murphy of Geodesic
Consulting, who's an invaluable source of guidance and support.
Organizational Management
From 2005 through 2006 I served as the first Executive Director of AttentionTrust,
an organization that sought to help people make effective use of our personal "attention data," a term that describes all the various
records and metadata that reflect what we pay attention to (and by extension, what we're interested in and what we value.) AttentionTrust, which is no longer in operation, hoped to educate people about the existence of attention data and distribute software that would allow people to capture this data and put it to use. I still believe the organization's mission was of profound importance, and if you're interested in learning more, one place to start is Wikipedia's entry on the "attention economy."
Throughout 2005 I also worked for Beaconfire Consulting as Senior Consultant. Beaconfire provides a range of technology services to large nonprofits, and I was involved with several strategy projects as well as the company's sales and business development efforts. They're great people, and if you work with a large nonprofit that needs assistance with website design, online fundraising, or technology strategy, they should be at the top of your list of potential partners.
From 2001 through 2005, I served as the first Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, aka N-TEN. With the support of hundreds of people throughout the nonprofit sector, I helped take N-TEN from a business plan with some startup funding and grew it into an international association of nearly 400 organizations. Among other programs, N-TEN hosts the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference and co-developed TechFinder, a directory of technology service providers for the sector. If you work with a nonprofit of any size, I'm sure you'd find it worthwhile to get involved with N-TEN--it's a great community.
Before I joined N-TEN in 2001, I earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where I focused on organizational development, entrepreneurship and technology.
From 1994 through 1998 I was the first person to serve as Associate Director at Compass Community Services in San Francisco. While at Compass I helped the agency double in size and raised over $1 million to support its social service programs.
In 1992 I was the first staff member hired by the Homeless Children's Network, and I helped the new organization achieve sustainability by acting as Services Coordinator through 1994. At both Compass and HCN, I supervised the development of client-services databases, a significant step in each organization's ability to measure the effectiveness of their programs.
Other Interests
In addition to my work as an executive coach and consultant, I'm interested in
the intersection of organizational culture and social technology. Much of my work has involved helping
organizations use technology to be more effective, and I know that
human factors are far more more important than technical issues in
determining the success or failure of any technology implementation.
We're currently seeing the widespread adoption of social
technology--tools that connect individuals, that are fueled by the
contributions of each user, and that establish and capitalize on an "architecture of participation"--and
in this environment the significance of human factors will only
increase. Any organization looking to adopt social technology tools
should be asking: Will our culture help or hinder the implementation
and use of these tools? How will these tools, in turn, affect our
organizational culture? And we should all be paying attention to the
answers.
I'm also interested in design, style and usability issues. I spent two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I believe that aesthetics play a powerful role in every experience, from using a website to walking down a city street. A particular inspiration in this area is Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style.
In addition to my MBA, I received a BA in History, magna cum laude, from Brown University, and I've lived in San Francisco with my wife Amy Wright (whom I first met in 1983 at Cumberland Valley High School) since 1990.
