Darko Lovric

Darko is a business psychologist and psychotherapist who has spent the last 15 years working with business leaders. He specializes in
working with founders, innovators and new business leaders, helping them build bespoke organizations and cultures as well as coaching a small group of clients as they grow their ventures.

As a young business student, he was exposed to psychology and fell in love with its understanding of how (and why) people think and act – and has been seeking ways to bring this type of understanding to the business world. This has led to a meandering path through HR and consulting before focusing on organizational design, high performance teams and individual coaching as three different levels of helping people and organizations act in their own best interests.

Darko is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and serves as faculty for the Aspen Institute and UM6P School of Collective Intelligence, lecturing on behavior change.

In his spare time he takes long hikes, reads long books, seeks good food and better wine and tries to balance it all with some rowing as well as much travel in Mediterranean.

Brian McIlroy

BRIAN: HELPING LEADERS AND TEAMS BE AT THEIR BEST

Brian has a passion for helping leaders and their teams to be at their very best in terms of performance, collaboration and commitment to a shared and meaningful purpose.
He has over 25 years working as a leader inside multinational businesses and also as a external consultant across a range of industries: pharma, manufacturing, technology, oil, manufacturing, telecoms and financial services.
Brian grew up Northern Ireland during a period of intense conflict within his country. As well as witnessing the destructive impact of conflict he also observed the immense possibilities for resolving deep seated differences through mutual understanding, compassion and connecting to shared human values. This helped to shape his belief that by consciously questioning deeply held assumptions and changing how we relate to one another, we can resolve seemingly intractable issues and achieve positive break throughs.
Brian believes that this is more relevant than ever in fast changing, uncertain, volatile and complex world business leaders face today. Helping leaders to think differently, see new possibilities, collaborate better and to build personal resilience is at the core of his work with Teams, Leadership Development and helping leaders Change Culture. He has considerable experience in coaching teams to be high performing, designing and delivering leadership programs for large world-wide organizations and helping leaders consciously shape the culture they need to successfully grow their businesses.
Brian lives in London with his wife and two young children spending much free time together in the outdoors. He is a keen endurance runner and member of his local running club. He has recently taken a strong interest in how people can build “peak performance” habits through physical, mindful, mental and spiritual practices in their lives. He also enjoys traditional Irish music in his local pub.

Ushma Pandya

USHMA: BUILDING SUSTAINABLE ORGANIZATIONS

Ushma helps organizations define their strategic priorities and set up the resources and systems to achieve their goals drawing on her 15+ years in global corporations and her advisory work across public, private and non profit sectors. Her career spans multiple functions and industries because of her natural curiosity in how organizations work. Ushma believes that strategy, organizational design and people strategy all need to work together to enable companies to achieve their vision. She works with companies on issues that intersect these three areas.
In addition, Ushma has an interest in zero waste issues and is active in the Zero Waste community in NYC. She is an active member of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board. She also works with businesses on reducing their waste and brings her behavior change experience to the problem.
She lives in NYC with her husband and two small kids who she is training to become aware of their environmental impact. She sits on the board of the NYLCV.

Rodrigo Herrera

RODRIGO: UNLOCKING POTENTIAL IS INSPIRING

Rodrigo has built a career around improving client performance at the individual, team and organizational levels.  He has proven his skill achieving over fifteen years of tangible results supporting individual leaders through executive coaching, helping working groups turn into highly effective teams, and removing the structural, organizational, and cultural barriers that keep companies from achieving their goals.

Rodrigo brings remarkable insight in understanding performance challenges as well as creativity in helping clients address them. He is passionate about supporting clients in developing their own capability to respond to increasing demands in their professional and business environments.

Rodrigo’s style is characterized by attentive listening and effectively understanding their situations and challenges prior to collaboratively developing an approach with his clients. By drawing on engagements across many industries and sectors, Rodrigo adapts frameworks, models, analogies, and questions that help them achieve breakthrough levels of achievement and impact.

His passion for capability development extends to his personal interests as he studies classical piano and  coaches youth soccer.

Jason Rabinowitz

Jason is fascinated by culture, and what makes people tick. He is a hybrid of cultures himself; his mother is straightforwardly British, but his father is originally from South Africa (having been kicked out for his anti-apartheid work), with the prior generation migrating there from Eastern Europe and Russia around the time of the Revolution. Perhaps this is what makes him so restless – he is continually in search of learning, transformation and change, which forms the bedrock of his professional work with clients.

In all his work, Jason seeks to unlock potential and release energy (mental, physical, emotional and spiritual) in individuals, teams and systems. He enjoys operating at various levels – from one-on-one coaching (where purpose and meaning is rarely off the agenda), through facilitating team alignment and consulting on whole systems cultural change – and, unsurprisingly, working in different cultures. A particular focus is helping people to shift to increasingly complex ways of understanding the world – drawing on Bob Kegan’s work on Immunity to Change and adult development. Travel is an enduring passion, particularly tapping into what makes places and people unique.

Jason’s early career was eclectic, ranging from research through teaching and marketing; he found his true calling twenty years ago, and has since alternated between working in complex, leading-edge multinationals, and being a consultant. He is a fully qualified executive coach and is currently studying for his third Masters degree, in coaching. In whatever spare time he has left, Jason can be found putting his body through the strains of cycling, running and triathlons; cooking and seeking out interesting food and drink; reading and cinema going; and faithfully following the glorious Arsenal football team.

Elspeth Chasser

Creating trust

Elspeth’s life-long passion is to help people and organizations transform so that they can achieve the success they desire. This passion has taken her from charity work, to consulting, to learning and development, back to consulting and now a wonderful mixture of them all.

One of the most instructive projects of her career was trouble shooting failing or failed multi-million dollar complex projects. What an insight into what it takes to change!

Elspeth is often called upon to guide senior teams through tough decisions or to resolve the dynamics that can often be uncovered by or arise in a transformation. She is a great listener and trusted keeper of confidences and also has the emotional intelligence to tell people the truth about the impact of their behaviors.

Funny, insightful and down-to-earth are words frequently used to describe her facilitation style. Elspeth is also fascinated by the neuroscience of habit change and uses this in her facilitation and leadership coaching to turn a potentially “touchy feeling” subject into something much more practical and irrefutable.

Elspeth’s clients are mostly in the technology, publishing, pharma, legal and financial services sectors. However, clients often comment on how quickly she can learn about their market and organization.

Although she lived most of her life in the UK, Elspeth moved to Boston 5 years ago and can be regularly found with her nose pressed up against the windows of MIT or Harvard trying to soak up any bit of learning she can.

Arjen Iwema

Embracing the globe as a place to do business

Arjen Iwema has worked as a consultant for almost two decades, in a wide range of settings across the globe. His core skill is to make people think about their own business a few degrees deeper than they normally do. Goal is to come up with an underlying vision and a tangible strategy, often more useful than a long list of to-do items. After all, leading in business is more than “holding the fort”.

Arjen likes working from a place of individual and intellectual freedom. A little distance from the subject helps to get a clear view.
Being trained as an Aerospace engineer with a strong ability to see through complex issues, having many years of strategy consulting experience combined with a foundation in an oil major, allow for his ability to quickly develop deep insight into new client situations.

Arjen’s core strength, according to one of his recent clients, is to provoke the team in a charming way to develop new insights and work together more closely on topics that matter. “Deep focus” is a characterisation that people have often used for the way Arjen works with his teams. Sometimes being a little “rough on the edges”, while caring passionately about the subject matter allows Arjen to get the best out of his clients. Arjen has a highly inclusive approach: he embraces all team members, no matter their different style, status or orientation and helps them perform to the level of their best abilities, sometimes far beyond what they imagine they can achieve.

Arjen’s work ranges from strategic consulting through facilitation to training development and execution.
He moved from the Netherlands to Switzerland 13 years ago and now lives close to Lake Geneva. Having worked in 30 countries, including Africa and the Middle- and Far East, Arjen loves embracing different cultures and quickly adapts his style to fit well in new environments. He speaks fluent Dutch, English, French and German.
When not working, Arjen spends time in the outdoors, often in the water. To go places, he likes to move fast; he has a passion for bikes, skis, nice cars.

Sara Ais

Broad impact on human behavior

Sara has always been motivated by helping others, and pursued an MD degree to enable herself to be of service. After 5 years as a clinical therapist, Sara decided she wanted to have a wider impact than she could have by working with individual patients. By working within the corporate world, with influential people (executives) who could better their organizations, she could multiply the positive impact she had on the world and the people around her. She decided to use her skills to help people be more relevant in the way they would manage their teams, and their business.

In addition to helping executives and their teams around the world and in many different industries (including Pharma and Health care) improve their leadership effectiveness, Sara finds time to be a visiting professor at the IDDI (Instituto de Desarrollo Integral de Directivos) from the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid; to collaborate with Instituto de Empresa and Wharton Business School in the US; and more recently to serve as associate faculty at ESADE Business school.

When Sara is not working, she is working… just in a different way! Over the years she has served NGO organizations in different roles, trying to give back  to society in a meaningful way what she had the opportunity to learn. She has served in social work in India, South Africa, Romania, Croatia… And of course as a good Spaniard, she enjoys gastronomic trips, where she can savor the good food and the good wines of the regions. In spite of her travels around the world, she considers Spain a paradise for food and wine.

Douglas Harrison

Helping others express themselves clearly and powerfully

Douglas’ background is in language and communications training. This is a natural inheritance from his background – French mother and British father, the latter with roots in Italy and also in Russia. His life as a child was graced by Dutch nannies; he married a Swedish woman. Douglas has lived and worked in four countries and is sensitive to different languages, cultures and subtexts..

Douglas’ work has always focsed on communication: linguistic, organizational, strategic. His greatest learning was leading his own organization into the jaws of the recession, and having to let go of the baby. Fortunately, the name lives on under new ownership. Douglas now works as a trainer specializing in organizational effectiveness and intercultural understanding. His work focuses on what we say, and how we say it – and he helps build assertiveness and clarity into the communications of native and non-native speakers alike. He is currently working in Ukraine. A sysiphian task? Maybe, but it brings its rewards. Douglas values good education and training highly, and ascribes his successes to what he learned at University and to various coaches and mentors throughout his working life. Good training leaves an indelible inprint.

When he is not working, Douglas can most likely be found on a hillside in Scotland. Or rowing on a loch. Getting out to the country is important for Douglas, who has always been a country-boy. He enjoys the huge freedom of location afforded by technology tools. His interests include Russian literature, looking at buildings and watching challenging films. He has two daughters whom he dotes on, and who in turn lean on his bank balance.

Alper Tengüz

Center your work around your talent (and stop doing the rest)

Alper works as a Learning Architect; he helps groups and individuals to design and change their life around what they want to achieve. For this purpose he brings his diverse background to play. Alper was born to Turkish parents and grew up in Frankfurt and the US. His first career as a management consultant and experience with a range of executives taught him that there is typically too little time and understanding around the cultivation of our own character and values. This lack of attention and importance can ruin business outcomes and relationships. In his work, Alper leverages his understanding of different industries and business challenges and his hundreds of hours with executives, employees and entrepreneurs on the personal challenges and passions of creating work (and life) that is meaningful. Being a learning architect means for Alper that he works with these principles:

• Humans want to assume responsibility and do what is of meaning to them
• Being creative and doing things differently we can create the solution to current challenges
• Bring all involved people together to solve the issues at hand
• It takes time to change things because we take time to change
• Center your work around your talent; bring all of who you are into your work

People like to work with Alper because they connect to his international background , diverse business and life perspective and his creativity and energy. For those who are curious he is a certified fitness instructor and Qigong trainer; others never find out.

Philippe Leonard

Know thyself – show thyself

During the first half of his career, when he was a marketing and sales executive, Philippe came to the conclusion that while leaders must possess functional and business expertise, real and lasting success is invariably rooted in deep self awareness, paired with the ability to express one’s true intentions in a way that is understandable and acceptable to others. As he managed and developed business and teams, he noted over and over again that those who connect with their true nature succeed more sustainably than those who don’t. He also realized that the biggest challenge managers and leaders face today is to develop their skills to address the human side of their business. He felt that much less support, and much less effective support, is typically available to address the “soft” elements of leadership.

Philippe then decided to shift from operational management to leadership development and executive coaching. He developed this new skill set both through professional courses and through hands-on experience. His mission is to help people and organizations connect with their true nature and express it skillfully and successfully.

Philippe believes strongly that leaders lead more through their day to day decisions and behaviors and interaction with others than through their statements. Better knowing themselves and the intentions behind their behaviors, and aligning those with the vision and the strategy of the company generates a dynamic for positive change.

Stijn Tilanus

Balancing head and heart

Throughout his career, Stijn aims to balance analytical skills with a creative touch, always putting people before numbers. He has switched between medical and consulting careers seamlessly multiple times. As a medical professional, he has a passion to get things done easier and better; he focused his career as an ENT/Head & Neck surgeon on clinical research and teaching, being aware that ‘science’ is only half of the equation of what life is about. The integrative approach he takes as a consultant helps his clients change their behavior and gain a new perspective on the true nature of health and sickness.

Recently, Stijn has shifted his focus from treatment of individuals to personal and team coaching, while keeping his fact based analytical toolkit at hand. ‘Making sense’ he sees as getting knowledge sunk in through actual sensed experience, which leads him to apply creative approaches in questions of leadership development, organizational and cultural change – approaches such as “constellations” and other physical expressions to clarify and resolve mental and emotional deadlocks. Stijn has a good nose for where mental constructs start blocking people and organizations, and is someone who will kindly ask the uncomfortable questions needed to untangle the spaghetti. From there, he believes, “once we see things as they are, we can let the right things happen by themselves.”

In his leisure time, Stijn can be found gardening, tending his sheep, playing the viola in an ensemble, watching birds near his home in the swamps of northern Holland, or sailing his wooden ‘punter’ with his family and friends.

Andrea Ingrisch

Wearing two hats

Andrea thrives on change, and has chosen consulting and coaching as her profession because it allows her to move around in many different environments. She believes she can add most value to her clients by bringing to bear her experiences from completely different contexts, and pointing out new possibilities.

Andrea has been wearing “two hats” for her entire professional life. She combines a psychology background with strategy consulting experience; an MBA with art therapy training; and her coaching experience with her corporate experience (which has put her ‘in the shoes of the client’). She believes in the importance of integrating commercial and human values, and is passionate about facilitating the “people” aspects of transformations. This can take the shape of a culture change program to support the strategy, a team alignment intervention to help a team collaborate for results, or an executive coaching one on one to help create awareness and responsibility and help a leader step up in a new role.

Andrea exchanged one exciting metropolis for another: she left Berlin a few years ago to live in London. While she enjoys the thoroughness, professionalism and quality inherent in the German culture, she also likes the tolerance, creativity and drive of the UK’s capital – another set of hats to combine. She thrives in truly global settings where the different nationalities bring another challenge to the work.

Andrea loves to cook with friends and family, and enjoys hiking in her beloved ‘home mountains’, the Alps. She loves the urban life just as much as the calming presence of the seaside.

Huihan Lie

Swinging beyond the comfort zone

Curiosity, a drive to develop, and a fascination with building bridges have been guiding forces throughout Huihan’s life.

They made him take a foundation in law and international organizations and enhance it with a business focus in consulting. Then, after having helped global companies grow in China, Huihan decided to enrich his strategy focus with execution skills and started work in-house, developing relations between China’s government and the Indian leadership of a global wind energy firm.

Building on these experiences and armed with the desire to create something new, Huihan is now setting up a service that provides roots-related research, travel and business consulting services for Overseas Chinese.

The same curiosity and bridge building drive have shaped Huihan as a musician. Having received professional musical training as a drummer, he also plays piano and guitar. His desire to combine different musical styles from across the world has seen him perform with local musicians throughout China, Western Europe, and West Africa.

As an Overseas Chinese born and raised in Holland but with family roots in Indonesia, Huihan’s cross-cultural curiosity translates into a travel passion to places outside the comfort zone. These have included North Korea, Iran, Syria, Burma, Serbia and many others.

It is these broad interests, coupled with a thirst for development, connecting and constructing, that characterizes Huihan’s work as a consultant for Sokrates Partners.

Hendrik Jan Laseur

HJ has “been there” himself

Hendrik-Jan (“HJ”) is an ex-banker who left his comfort zone in 2007, to pursue his dream of serving the greater good of sustainable development. He discovered his passion for leadership development through his advisory roles for the chairman of a global bank, and of the executive director of the world’s largest humanitarian institution. His current work is built on the notion that sustainable development is first and foremost a matter of leadership.  His experience in private and public sectors in various countries has made him sensitive to cultural aspects of change. In his work with Sokrates Partners, he supports leaders and organizations in complex transformation processes where these cultural dimensions play a prominent role.

HJ’s core strength is two-fold. First, having lived in nine different countries and worked in three very different sectors (finance, humanitarian, nature-conservation), he brings the type of experience that yields unconventional solutions to clients on issues around leadership and culture. Second is the fact that he has performed in numerous leadership roles himself. With his first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be on the front line, he has a deep understanding of the trade-offs and tensions that such roles entail for the leaders he works with, and what can be some of the keys to success: authenticity, teamwork, and empathy.

HJ’s great personal passion is to sail his classic wooden ship, 1933-built “Hallowe’en”, in the Mediterranean with his young family.

Federico Bugallo

Empathetic strategy development

Federico is a career consultant. He loves the variety of his work in many different industries and in many geographies, especially when it takes him to unique (and fun) locations to be “close to the action”, such as inside leading TV studios in Miami, a remote mine in Chile, or an airline maintenance location in the middle of Brazil. Some of his most recent projects include:

• Global Retail Bank in Brazil. Diagnostic and implementation of span of control optimization, efficiency opportunities, and elimination of duplicated functions, generating commitment to save up-to-date of R$ 33 MM annualized.
• Latin American Food Products company – Identification of productivity and cost reductions opportunities in 3 factories Argentina. Subsequent feasibility study.
• National Oil Company in Argentina: Identification of cost reduction opportunities across all common areas (Accounting, Planning, Finance, HR, communications, back office, shared services). Subsequent feasibility study

Federico is a sharp strategic thinker with strong business acumen and a pragmatic approach to implementation; he is also an open minded and warm personality, and highly empathetic to his clients’ needs, both at the business level and at the emotional level. His insight and empathy combined enable him to truly understand “what it would take to win” for his clients. In his strategic alignment work, Federico helps clients build and understand their real strategic options, think through the potential implications that each option would have, and generate unexpected new opportunities; and at the same time he also focuses on how they can build the right teams, with the right people and with the right spirit. He commits with equal passion to enabling his clients’ business results, and to helping them be the best they can be, and find fulfillment and pride in their work.

Federico’s desire for variety has led him to experience many homes: he has lived and worked in the US, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Spain and Argentina throughout his 12 years consulting career. Through that much travel, he has learned to be humble, take nothing for granted, and always be curious about other people’s perspectives.

Federico is an outdoors sportsman, and enjoys playing tennis, golf, riding horses out in the countryside where he likes to spend his weekends, and spending quality time with this family and friends.

Martha Debs

The art of communication

Martha is a communications consultant with over 30 years of corporate experience in Japan, the US, and Europe. Raised in the flower-power-era San Francisco Bay Area, she was catapulted into a straight-laced girls’ high school in Osaka as a 16-year-old exchange student, and never took communication for granted again.

After many rewarding years in Japan – including a stint as the only foreigner in the 5,000-employee HQ of a major Japanese conglomerate – she received an offer she couldn’t refuse: an opportunity to serve management consulting teams and clients in Europe as an editor and ghostwriter. Based in the Benelux, but living out of suitcase much of the time in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, Martha found herself increasingly involved – and increasingly interested – in communications skill-building initiatives, mainly the design and delivery of training programs on topics as varied as exhibit design, cross-cultural communications, meeting effectiveness, team dynamics, and synthesis in verbal and written communication.

After all her travels, Martha still finds packing and unpacking a chore, but she delights in working with, and learning from, colleagues and clients around the world. She is known as a warmly caring and conscientious trainer and coach who listens well, prepares thoroughly, and goes the extra mile to ensure an enjoyable and high-impact learning experience for each participant.

In her spare time in Amsterdam, Martha can be found studying her favorite Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum, applauding performances of the Dutch National Ballet, speedwalking in the Vondelpark, or people-watching at her “regular” canalside café.

Nick McRoberts

The difference between good and great is not magic

Nick McRoberts began piano lessons at the age of five and went on to study conducting and composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium before moving to Paris, where he lives today. While studying music, Nick became fascinated by the difference between musicians and orchestras who were simply good, and those that had some form of greatness. He discovered that the leader is important, but so to is the broader leadership and the attention given to creating the best possible conditions for others to do and be their best.

Starting in 2004, Nick did additional studies in cognitive therapy and psychometrics and now applies the lessons from conducting music to his work as a leadership development consultant and executive coach, helping people to improve their “soft” skills and discover what really makes the difference in motivating and inspiring teams.

He lives in Paris and travels regularly to Australia, the Americas, China and all over Europe. He continues to have a full music diary conducting, arranging and composing.

Michael Newman

Moments can change a life

At the age of 15, whilst on a geography field trip, Michael and his class were asked to walk up the imposing Grisedale Pike in the English Lake District; this kick-started a lifelong love of mountains. Michael has since shared his passion by introducing hundreds of people to the joys of the high hills. As a qualified mountain leader he has led expeditions and seen people’s eyes opened in the Alps, Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and many other smaller ranges in Oceania, Africa and Europe.

It was whilst surveying a remote glacier in North Norway for his BSc thesis that Michael had another life changing moment. When he was sharing a mug of tea with a friend, watching the sun reflecting off the 80km wide ice-cap below, the discussion turned to what job might pay them to be in such a place. It turned out that the British Army’s Royal Engineers happily employ Officers to travel the world to climb mountains and make maps. The chance to play with explosives and giant armored vehicles was an added bonus. After 7 years service, including operational duty in jungle, desert and urban environments, Michael found himself back as a civilian wondering; “what next?”

A chance meeting with the inspirational head of a leadership development group provided a neat solution. His personal mantra was “If you don’t know what to do, try something. If you enjoy it; keep doing it. If not; stop doing it and try something else”. Michael adopted this immediately and has spent a very happy 12 years evolving and adapting his expertise in Leadership Development. His solid experience of leading in difficult situations provides a frame of reference for his work; new concepts that he comes across are tested by asking; “Could I have applied this in practice?” If the answer is “yes”, then it will be admitted into his repertoire of ideas. Usefully, the many industries he works in constantly expose him to new ideas, as does his extensive reading in science, mathematics, and history. Michael often hears clients tell him how inspiring and infectious they find his thirst for learning. He will continue enjoying his profession until he stops learning new things, at which time he will happily move on and find something new.

Paul ter Linden

Fierce learning

Raised by anti-capitalist, academia-loving and socially-minded parents, Paul has made quite a personal and professional journey that has brought him, among others, at the head of a decidedly capitalist undertaking, an international car leasing business. Today, returned to the professional service world in which he spent most of his career, Paul has found his professional destiny as a specialist in behavioral change and learning.

Paul describes himself as a “fierce learner” who seeks and finds opportunities for personal and professional growth in any environment and situation, approaching these with a mixture of curiosity, confrontation, courage and compassion. This “fierce learning” attitude that Paul applies to himself also defines his signature presence with clients. He seeks to understand, is clear in sharing observations, will rather experiment than theorize, and takes care to provide a safe environment for reflection and learning.

With a common theme in behavioral change and learning, Paul takes diverse roles in serving Sokrates clients. He consults to senior leaders to help them in their roles of shapers and pathfinders of large-scale organizational change; he facilitates teams that are in search of more productive ways of collaboration; and he coaches individuals looking to achieve breakthroughs in their personal or professional lives. And while he may from time to time nudge his clients on with a helpful insight, framework or idea, he always works from the realization that ultimately his clients, and not he, will need to shape and own whatever actions follow from his presence and contribution.

Paul lives in Amsterdam. When he is neither working nor spending time with his family, Paul might be in an Aikido dojo, in the sky training for his private pilot license, in the countryside hiking and making landscape photos, or tucked away somewhere with a history book.

Sankar Krishnan

Sustainable development in health and education

Sankar is a solver of complex, systemic problems that depend on leadership effectiveness for their resolution. He spent the first half of his career as a partner at McKinsey, where he led the growth of the healthcare practice in India and across Greater China. Sankar served top executive teams, particularly in healthcare, in a variety of multinational and local pharmaceutical companies, government and quasi-government bodies, hospital chains and health insurance companies across India, China, Israel and West Asia, and South East Asia. He led an industry-wide effort in India to develop a blueprint for the Pharma industry of the future.

In McKinsey he was Dean of an internal leadership program for young leaders; at present he continues to lead change management and leadership development programs for top and senior managements.

Today, he focuses his energy and expertise on his personal passion: driving change in the not-for-profit/development sector in India, particularly in health care and education – the two biggest and most meaningful systemic issues to solve. His combination of business acumen and intuitive empathy allows him to help create significant improvements in the lives of large numbers of people. He also continues to work with top executive teams at for-profit companies.

In 2001, he was selected by India’s top business magazine, Business Today, as among the Top 25 leading young achievers in the country. One decade later, fuelled by equal parts passion and intellectual curiosity, Sankar continues to enable a wide spectrum of organizations to achieve their own strategic objectives and support the wellbeing of others.

Laura Daley

A pragmatic helper

A life long learner with a drive to get things done, Laura has spent her career in professional services working with a variety of clients, sometimes learning about things she’d never expected, in places she never thought she’d find herself! The hallmark of Laura’s work is solving problems in a way that is practical while respecting the challenges of change and seeking its rewards.

Throughout her career, Laura has pursued opportunities where she could make an impact on people and organizations. After a decade of systems and management consulting in the US and Europe, she joined Katzenbach Partners, working with clients to realize their strategic goals through shifts in organizational capabilities and structure. Thus began her passion for developing leaders and organizations. A ‘helper’ at heart, Laura left to join Spencer Stuart, where she led professional development initiatives focused on personal effectiveness. Her work supported colleagues in achieving their potential in the areas of leadership, executive presence and business development.

Laura’s breadth of experience has included memorable moments such as practicing Aikido with client teams during the launch of the UK’s first virtual bank, riding with industrial waste engineers throughout Texas to identify and train on top performers’ behaviors, and, for a CPG leadership team, facilitating a Teams Effectiveness workshop that included a traditional Maasai barbecue in Kenya. She draws on these and many other experiences to help clients clarify issues, establish realistic goals and develop a pragmatic approach to resolving them.

Laura lives in Philadelphia with her husband, daughter and dog where she plays an active role in the school community and is in constant pursuit of the perfect workout and the perfect meal, at home and away.

Akira Otani

The trusted shepherd

Akira is a licensed psychologist who has taught and practiced counseling psychology for more than 25 years in the U.S. A Japanese native educated both in Japan and in the U.S., he is thoroughly bicultural in his professional orientation and personal values.

His clinical experience with a multitude of clients has provided him with unique insights into human nature as well as with differential intervention approaches to assess and solve problems. This tenet, in combination with his multicultural knowledge and familiarity, has helped him design and develop several successful corporate training programs in Japan. Through this work, Akira has become quite familiar with the health care and pharma landscape in Japan and its specific issues and opportunities.

He has been a popular facilitator, trainer and consultant, both in Japan and the U.S., in part because of his thorough inquiry into topics of discussion or presentation and in part because of his personable, often humorous, presentation style that makes potentially complex issues easy to comprehend for the audience. He is culturally sensitive to domains ranging from more obvious ethnicity and gender issues to more subtle corporate, labor and organizational factors.

On a personal level, he has been practicing yoga for more than 15 years. He has mastered various advanced postures (asanas) that he even considered “impossible” in the beginning. He practices meditation and psychological hypnosis regularly while teaching these skills to qualified healthcare professionals. He loves to cook, especially Chinese, which requires elaborate preparation of basic ingredients, followed by swift and creative adaptation of original recipes!

Deborah Thomas

Loving learning

Learning has been absolutely pivotal in Deborah’s life, and she’d like everyone she comes into contact with to benefit from its power. Her childhood studiousness and academic aptitude propelled her from a small and very dull village in the north of England to the inspirational environments of Oxford University and then London. Here, after a period exercising her creative muscles in the advertising and design business, she spent almost two decades with the management consultancy McKinsey.

Deborah was originally hired to help McKinsey consultants get their ideas across clearly to their clients, but rapidly saw that what mattered much more than mere clarity was that they built strong, trust-based human relationships. She devoted herself to that cause, which demanded rapid learning and personal growth of her own; she then took what she had learned into client service, and moved into a different role, coaching and training McKinsey clients to build the personal insight and skills to lead people and engage them in change.

After almost 20 years in this rich playground, she decided that she would learn more about the things she most cares about by working outside a large firm. She is focusing her consulting practice on leadership skills, and now also has time to act as a learningmentor for refugee schoolchildren with the London charity Love to Learn.

Bel Popovic

The curious cultural pragmatist

Bel has always been curious about the decisions people make in life and business. This curiosity combined with a unique approach in facilitating challenging conversations with top teams allows her clients to tap into what is truly valued and how those values impact their results.

Her passion is helping clients understand how their current culture impacts the execution of their future strategy, and what are the . necessary culture changes needed for a different result . Her work ranges from facilitating top team interventions and organizational design, to strategy facilitation and executive coaching. By helping clients bridge the gap between their strategy and culture, Bel helps them drive a better business result, that is sustained over time.

In her consulting work over the past 6 years, Bel has served top teams in finance, retail, FMCG, telecommunications, IT, and specialist medical industries. She appreciates that her role as consultant is to ask robust questions that go beyond what clients have already asked themselves.

Executives enjoy her direct, thoughtful and pragmatic approach when working with complex problems. Her combined external consulting and internal advisor experience provides her with foundational links in strategy, leadership and culture. She grounds her work with what is ‘fit for purpose’ and delivers this in non-theoretical ways.

Bel is incredibly fascinated by the nuances of different cultures. Her multi-cultural family comprises of a Croatian husband, an Australian born son who began his early years living in Vietnam, and an Ethiopian born daughter. Moving from Melbourne, Australia to live in Asia (Vietnam and now Singapore) with her family, she enjoys interesting cultural adventures. By the way, the family dog is German!

Martin Sommer

From strategy to front line impact

Martin is a top management consultant who evolved to a senior advisor in transformation and change, leveraging the people dimension to generate impact.

Over the last 13 years he has worked with many leading companies in Latin America and the US on key transformation programs in topics such post merger integration, “lean key processes”, cost reduction, channel effectiveness, new channel development and cultural transformation.

This work has shaped Martin’s consulting style. Beyond models and powerpoints, he strives for leadership alignment, frontline engagement and pragmatic feasibility evaluation in any engagement. Through his energetic and passionate personality, he role models the passion, the rigor and the momentum that a change program needs. He has received many job offers from clients while helping them with their change programs.

Martin has a sharp view of spotting value levers, enablers and untapped potential, allowing him to work based on hypothesis and to provide quick insights to senior management to build a case to challenge the status quo and broaden aspirations.

Living in Latin America, Martin has experienced many economic up and downturns. He highlights the importance of flexibility and adaptability in big corporations and translates that in supporting his clients in FOCUS. A few things, but well executed. He applies the same concepts when advising ad honorem entrepreneurs of Endeavor, the leading entrepreneurial network in Latin America.

Martin lives in Argentina with his wife and 2 daughters. He enjoys the beach, swimming in the sea and reading historical novels.

Margreet (“Maggie”) Van De Griend

Bridging the Atlantic

Margreet (“Maggie”) van de Griend has been a consultant for most of her adult life and is the founder of Sokrates Partners. She believes she can do her best work as a “professional outsider”: passionately engaged with each client’s success, but not a part of the organization. This allows her the freedom to ask lots of probing questions, even the difficult ones.

Maggie’s core strength, according to one of her recent clients, is “building bridges”. Not just bridges between people and teams, but also between opinions, cultures, different work styles, silos in the organization, and different objectives and interests. Her work spans the range from facilitating strategic planning, to culture change, to designing and leading top leadership team interventions; the guiding theme of her work is always helping clients solve their own problems, rather than solving problems for them.

She moved from the Netherlands to the US almost two decades ago and maintains homes in both countries, with New York her primary residence and Amsterdam secondary. She is very attached to the Dutch culture of pragmatism and direct expression, as well as the typical dry sense of humor of her native land. But she also enjoys living in a culture that encourages ambition and optimism, and is grateful for the the entrepreneurial opportunities she has found in the United States. In her work with global clients, she aspires to bridge the Atlantic, and bring the best of European and American culture together.

When she is not serving her clients, Maggie can likely be found on horseback in some remote mountain range, or working on her manuscript titled, “New Amsterdam”, which is about notable cultural differences between Amsterdam and New York.