"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." - Gandhi

Overview

USA Biographies

Juli Ann Reynolds

Women Roar! Juli Ann has enthusiastically re-invented herself over the last 20 years. She started her career as a practicing psychologist and director of a psychotherapy clinic in Cambridge, MA and spearheaded an organizational development and management consulting practice.

Juli Ann took a “break”, lived in London for three years and traveled the world. On her return to the States, she became a Partner and Managing Director in the executive search industry. Working closely with global corporations as well as start-up and fast-growth companies, she had the cat’s seat on business strategy and execution from the board room down the ranks.

In conducting Board, CEO and Divisional President searches, she developed first hand knowledge of leadership styles. In hundreds of interviews, she saw “up close and personal” the unique distinctions between men and women leaders and their organizational models as well as critical success factors.

Juli Ann also developed her own board experience: Chairman of the Compensation Committee for Daley and Wolcott, a $50 million software company (1995 -1998); President and CEO of The Boston Club, a 600 member and largest senior executive woman’s organization in New England (2000 – 2002) and Board member (1992 – 2003); the Women’s Leadership Board for the Kennedy School at Harvard University and ha recently been nominated a “a business woman to watch in 2006!”

Today, Juli Ann’s in-depth knowledge of business and people positions her effectively as the CEO of an enterprise, Tom Peters Company, a management consulting firm. Her understanding of the profoundly disruptive nature of the New Economy, and her enthusiastic willingness to reinvent herself to meet each business challenge make her the ideal pilot for a global organizational transformation organization based on the pioneer of passion and reinvention, Tom Peters.

Juli Ann holds a B.A. degree from Mount Marty College, Yankton South Dakota and a M.A. degree from the University of Georgia, Athens GA.

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Valarie D. Willis

Have heels, will travel! A shoe consultant at heart, Valarie has a passion for anything that has a shoe on it—from ornaments to soap—and she has an extensive shoe collection to prove it. In addition to shoes, Valarie has a high-stepping passion for working with organizations that are ready to take the big strides into innovation, branding, and leadership.

Valarie is a noted speaker, consultant, and writer. Known for her passion, energy, and detail (she’s been described by one client as “smart and sassy”), Valarie has earned her reputation as the Queen of WOW! She pounds the pavement looking for opportunities to engage clients in re-imagining their business in a disruptive age. Armed with a background in Information Technology and Customer Service, Valarie has countless client success stories to show for her efforts, including …

  • Providing leadership and arbitration between technical and non-technical staffs in a billion-dollar merger.
  • Marshaling collaboration of cross-functional groups and executives to successfully integrate six brands.
  • Consulting with a major health care provider to improve talent development and training.
  • Transforming a lethargic customer service group into an energetic team, delivering “legendary” customer service and far exceeding performance goals.
  • Delivering keynotes on leadership, innovation, brand alignment, customer service, women’s issues, and more, to Fortune 500 companies, colleges, churches, and others.

Valarie has worked in a wide range of industries, including finance, technology, retail, and manufacturing. She draws from a multi-faceted, 25-year-plus work history—in the trenches, in countless layers of management, in the executive office, as a church and community leader, and as an entrepreneur.

Some of her ecstatic clients include the US Army, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Anthem, Medical Management Group Association, New York Life, Green Square Inc., Credit Union National Association, Bendix, and Memorial Hospital.

Valarie holds an MBA from Xavier University. She is also a member of the National Speakers Association.

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John O’Leary

John is probably the only business consultant who has lived with the Grateful Dead, studied New Testament Greek at the Yale Divinity School, run as an independent candidate for Governor of Connecticut, and hosted a television talk show. He has also been a folk/rock musician for 30 years, performing in the US, Canada, and the UK.

But for more than two decades John has been primarily immersed in organizational transformation.

  • As a consultant he has spearheaded numerous large-system change initiatives in manufacturing and service companies, resulting in dramatic cost reductions and cultural transformations.
  • As a trainer he has conducted more than 500 seminars on leadership, communication, and transformational change and has trained other trainers to lead similar seminars for over 50,000 participants.
  • As a coach he has worked with hundreds of executives and teams in the last 25 years in industries as varied as insurance, manufacturing, financial services, construction, and high tech.

John’s strength is his ability to help already-successful leaders and teams break the grip of belief systems that keep them from producing at the next level. Since his student days at Yale in the 1960s he has studied the effect of mental models on individual, team, and organizational performance, and he has found creative ways of freeing clients from self-limiting beliefs to produce expanded results. For seven years he hosted a cable TV show in the Boston area, “The Art of Coaching,” on which he explored innovative coaching techniques with leading-edge practitioners.

John has also been a fundraiser for an international non-profit, a reviewer of business book proposals for a major publishing house, and the author of The Running Game, a humorous journal on politics and the media, which was excerpted in Harper’s. His latest book-in-the-making is Cool Teams! Business Lessons from Rock & Roll Bands.

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Mike Neiss

A client once told him, “We hire you because you are the only consultant that was honest enough to tell us our baby was ugly.” Even when the speech is figurative, Mike has a reputation for straight talk—earned in his career in operations management at United Parcel Service and in OD at CMS Energy and Rochester Products Division of General Motors. Since then, his firsthand experience of working with outspoken and innovative thought leaders such as W. Edwards Deming, Chip Bell, Jim Kouzes, and Tom Peters has only encouraged him!

Mike’s consulting practice spans 20 years and has included:

  • DaimlerChrysler/UAW partnership efforts to improve quality
  • Vehicle launches at DaimlerChrysler and Ford
  • Partnering in one of the first experiential learning centers for executive teams
  • Designing and implementing leadership bench strength efforts at Herman Miller
  • Performance improvement efforts at several federal agencies including the intelligence community, the Navy, GSA, and Department of the Treasury
  • Mergers and acquisitions work in the reinsurance industry
  • Executive coaching to help emperors discover new clothes
  • Branding efforts at Heineken and NavAir
  • Helping internal staff think and act like professional service firms.

His business commitment, in a sentence, is “the endless pursuit of trying to blend humanity with profitability.”

Mike also loves to teach leadership using golf as a metaphor; he has a passion for photography (especially digital); and he is involved in Blue Star Music Camps (“where kids rock”). At home he’s on the speed dial for the Humane Society, because his two dogs, two cats, and two horses are, in his words, “charity cases.”

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LJ Rose

She’s a world traveler. For 2 years LJ Rose circled the globe on a solo mission of exploration through 29 countries spanning Oceania, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. Her experiences along the way with life and death inspired her to work in Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta. Her passion for indigenous areas of the world deepens annually with solo expeditions off the beaten path. Encouraged to share her stories, LJ has had poetry and personal narratives published in numerous journals and gives speeches on the topic of Exploration.

Insomnia hit in 1992. Hearing compositions in her head, LJ recorded her first CD, “Peripheral Vision,” and is currently producing her second CD of original songs. Street singing in San Francisco, improv classes, and sea kayaking also keep the creative juices flowing.

Business acumen always helps. LJ has been one of the nation’s youngest business school deans, the first female Sales & Marketing Area Manager for Krofta Engineering, and a business coach since 1998. She has 15 years’ experience with precedent-setting leadership and is now a Facilitator and Speaker with The Tom Peters Company.

High energy and humor help, too. LJ has used her strategic and tactical mindset to work cross-functionally with emerging leaders and executive teams to achieve aggressive goals. She has also worked with employees at numerous organizational levels, in functions as varied as Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, R & D, Engineering, Operations, Manufacturing, HR, and Customer Support. Passionate about ideas, talent, and results, she is accustomed to facilitating difficult business and people-driven issues. Working with organizations ranging in size from 20 employees to 150,000, she has helped clients implement leadership competencies, shift cultures from compliance to commitment, and re-work business-as-usual ideas into high-impact projects.

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Bruce Laing

Since 2004, Bruce Laing has led the product development for the Tom Peters Company. He employs the right combination of consultation with executives, planning with work teams, executive education, structured customer involvement programs, and a variety of training programs such as marketing, sales, service, and leadership, to sharpen strategic intentions and to enhance work force performance. He also uses change management and corporate culture techniques. His work has taken him around the globe, from Boston to Barcelona to Bejing, and across industries from high technology to financial services to manufacturing. Over the years, Bruce has consulted with Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Merrill Lynch International, Kennametal, the Coca-Cola Company, Gambro-Hospal, Saudi-Hollandi Bank, MCI, AIG, HP, and other sets of initials.

Bruce is also on the faculty of Duke University’s corporate education division, which keeps his brain fresh and his academic expertise at the front-edge, in balance with his experience as a practitioner. He did his undergraduate work in the psychology of learning, and his graduate degree in management. Bruce also is a close associate of several consulting firms whose clients are seeking his kind of expertise, including the Tom Peters Company, where he recently helped us develop our new leadership offering, Re-imagine Excellence!.

Outside of the work world, Bruce is an active volunteer, teaching children to play tennis, helping the United Way decide how to best allocate donated funds, serving the board of New England Bio-Labs Foundation as they make micro–grants in favor of pristine environments, does research for the local Historical Society, and from time to time assists ArtCorps, a seedling organization that seeks and funds creative ways of documenting and spreading good work.

Bruce is a voracious reader, enjoys cross-country skiing when he can, and has recently succumbed to the sport of Sudoku. Bruce lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts with his wife, daughter, and two Airedales, and a son who is mostly at University.

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Matt Balachandran

Matt has counseled thousands—from presidents of countries to university professors, from musicians and actors to doctors and nurses, from captains of great ships to couples in crisis. And only for the price of a drink.

Matt paid his dues as a bartender and he can tell you a few stories, though—not surprisingly—he’s even better at eliciting your stories. His listening skills, combined with 12 years in the service industry, have made him a top-notch sales associate and Manager of the WOW! Store at the Tom Peters Company. He’s especially proud of his association with some of the greatest chefs and restaurateurs in the business, who have taught him how to provide an extraordinary and lasting “customer experience.”

Sri Lanka is his country of origin, a place he barely remembers yet has strong feelings for. His parents moved west so that their children could have a better quality of life, for which Matt is forever grateful.

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Rachel Gaddy

The second eldest of eight children, Rachel Gaddy is a born leader, who one day hopes to be a member of the United States Congress….or at least be the one pulling the strings! A passionate do-gooder, Rachel attended Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice intent on becoming the World’s Most Successful Lawyer. She soon realized that law was not for her, so she decided to throw her passion into business. With a diverse background in areas such as hospitality, child care, retail and public service, Rachel excels when managing interpersonal relationships and executing quality customer service. She continues to hone these skills as the Internal Marketing Director for TPC, a position she has held since February of 2004. Rachel manages TPC’s website; acts as a liaison between TPC clients and TPC facilitators/speakers; oversees the design/distribution/updating of all intellectual property; assists with the customization of client training programs; directs logistics for all workshops and speaking engagements, as well as designs our marketing projects. Along with changing the world of work at TPC, Rachel tries her best to change the world around her by volunteering as often as possible. She enjoys working with Habitat for Humanity, WBUR/National Public Radio, The Red Cross, and many other grassroots organizations with various causes. Along with volunteering, Rachel enjoys traveling, movies, art museums, antiques, the RED SOX! and interior design.

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Dick Heller

Dick’s view of the world encompasses passion, energy, and perception! As an avid scuba diver, art historian, crossword constructor, and photographer, Dick is always searching for new ways of looking at our lives and the way we work. A major theme of Dick’s outlook is the courage to risk change, and his brand promise, based on success and experience, is “I’ll get you to stick your neck out!”

Dick is a high-energy consultant, trainer, and speaker who has worked with organizations in the US and abroad to design programs that enhance leadership, talent, team building, and customer service in climates of disruption and change. He has consulted with senior management groups to create leadership development processes aimed at achieving and surpassing corporate and business objectives and has trained all levels of organizational personnel in these issues.

Dick has worked with the Tom Peters Company for over ten years, serving as Vice President and Chief Inspiration Officer, consultant and facilitator. He also spent five years consulting with ODI, a major TQM company focused on issues of productivity and quality in a wide variety of organizations.

Earlier in his career he was an independent producer and director of video programming for private industry and public television. In that capacity he created information and training programs for many clients. While with WGBH-TV in Boston, he directed broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops Orchestras, documentary programming for NOVA, two seasons of the Emmy-winning children’s program ZOOM, and other cultural and educational broadcast events.

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Marlene C. Dolan

At the age of 15 she rode her bike to her father’s workplace, knocked on his boss’s door, and asked for a raise for her father! A portent of things to come for a precocious upstart who understood people’s needs at an early age. A few decades later, Marlene Dolan is a consultant specializing in the human aspects (no surprise!) of business transformation and change management. She designs and implements people-intensive change events—ones that can help a workforce quickly shift direction and begin working toward a new business strategy. She has hands-on experience launching enterprise-wide culture change, customer relations strategies, executive education redesign, reorganization, and the development and cascade of new statements of vision, mission, and values.

As a consultant, Marlene has worked with executive teams at Pepsi-Cola Company, Harrah’s Entertainment, Monsanto, Maersk Sealand Services, Schering-Plough, United Technologies, Deutsche Banc Alex Brown, U.S. Postal Service, General Mills, and Hewlett Packard. Examples include:

  • Leading an assignment for the president and executive team to create a customer-driven vision and implement a global culture change;
  • Designing and facilitating a series of team building sessions for the president and his team that resulted in a new mission and leadership agenda;
  • Developing and delivering training to introduce a culture of time-to-market urgency and related management principles to the top 300 executives;
  • Leading an engagement that retrained 1600 supervisors and customer contact staff in a new model for improved customer experience.

Prior to consulting, Marlene was the SVP of Human Resources at The Forum Corporation. There she pioneered the firm’s first project management and delivery process and helped launch the firm’s organizational change consultancy.

Marlene has been a featured speaker at Harvard University, Project World, The American Society of Training and Development, and the Boston Organization Development Network. She holds a Masters degree in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University.

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Michael D. Maginn

Michael D. Maginn is one of the lead product designers for the Tom Peters Company.

Dr. Maginn has over 20 years of experience as a management consultant assisting organizations achieve sustainable strategic outcomes and improving performance. Dr. Maginn has extensive international consulting experience, including extended assignments in Asia, Europe, and North America.

As past Vice President, Research and Development for the Forum Corporation, he designed and developed Influence, a multi-million dollar success story in the training industry that teaches cross-functional, team-oriented skills. During this time, he delivered consulting services for companies including T. Rowe Price, Liberty Mutual, CIGNA, CNA, State Street Bank, J.P. Morgan, Coca-Cola, IBM, Digital Equipment Corp., MBNA America, Continental Insurance, MCI, Chase Manhattan Bank, Sears, Keystone Investor Resource Center, Time, Inc., Fidelity Investments, Prudential Securities, Marriott, Bank Indonesia, Archstone-Smith Communities, Fleet Private Clients Group, Pitney Bowes, Pepsi-Cola, BayBanks, Institute of Certified Travel Agents, Toronto Dominion Bank, Matsushita Electronics Corporation of America, GRE Insurance and others.

Dr. Maginn is the author of Effective Teamwork: Managing In Changing Times and Making Teams Work. He is also publisher of ManagerZine, an electronic newsletter for clients.

Dr. Maginn has an AB in English and Journalism and MS in Education from Syracuse University, and an Ed.D. from the University of Southern California in Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology. After completing his doctorate, he spent a year in Asia teaching in USC’s Overseas Master’s Program.

Mike lives with his wife and two children in Hamilton, MA, and enjoys sailing, cross-country skiing, cycling and playing the guitar.

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Dr. Susan A. Murphy

Dr. Susan Murphy joined the Tom Peters Company team in 2006. She is a business and organizational consultant whose background includes over 25 years of national and international experience with over 300 organizations including many Fortune 500 companies. Some of Susan’s clients include the U.S. Army™, the Jet Propulsion Lab™ (JPL), the National Broadcasting Company™ (NBC), State Farm Insurance™, and the American Hospital Association™.

Susan has an extensive background, which combines the three worlds of corporate leadership, academia and management consulting. She has been an Executive in two Fortune 500 Corporations, has served on the faculty at the University of San Francisco, Graduate School, and has performed corporate-wide international management consulting for 20 years to a variety of industries.

She specializes in Leadership and Team Development, Gender Differences, Change Management, Performance Management, and Customer Service. Susan has written three books; Quantitative Approaches to Management, In the Company of Women, co-authored with Dr. Pat Heim, and her third book, Conversations On Success, was released in 2004. Susan is also a noted keynote speaker, speaking for corporations & professional groups on leadership, change management, gender and generational differences, team development, customer service, project management.

Susan is known for her wit and wisdom. She combines research and theory with real life experiences. Her humorous style and useful techniques have been well received throughout the United States and internationally. She holds a B.S. from Vanderbilt University, M.B.A. from Pepperdine University, M.A. in Organization Development and a Ph.D. in Organizational Systems.

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