"I love helping businesses grow by building strong connections with both their customers and their employees. I thrive on learning what makes businesses tick. That helps me discover the drivers for making the critical and highly focused changes in leadership and organizational skills that lead to business growth."

" I have sunk deep roots in a way of working that always starts first with the business (and its customers), thinks about the organization as a system and brings solutions to the table that deliver results—versus pushing products."

Professional/Corporate Experience

Senior Vice President Human Resources, American Express
Vice President Executive and Management Development, Bank of America
Strategic Partner, The Tom Peters Group
Board Member (twice) and member of the Executive Committee of the Human Resource Planning Society
Adjunct Professor in MBA Programs of Portland State and Marylhurst University

Background

Jeannie helps companies of all sizes develop the leadership skills, business acumen and organizational culture to grow the business. Throughout her career both in companies and as a consultant she has helped senior management successfully work on the “people side” of implementing business strategy. She believes that many well-meaning investments in people and culture lack intellectual rigor and are not clearly linked to business outcomes. She grounds all her work in the business strategy and helps her clients take concrete practical steps that lead to performance results in the short term and add to the capability of the organization to pursue future growth.

With 18 years of business experience as a senior HR executive under her belt she founded her consulting company in 1986. Before starting this company, she was the groundbreaking designer of the talent management/succession planning system implemented in the late 1970's with Lou Gerstner, then her boss at American Express. This process is still in operation today and has produced many generations of high caliber leaders, including the current CEO, Ken Chenault. She also headed the leadership development and HR strategy groups at Bank of America and was a strategic partner of the Tom Peter's Group delivering an innovative product called Creating Value for the Customer .

One of her primary beliefs is that people learn to lead from experience, by “going to school on themselves.” This value permeates her coaching work with individuals and executive teams as well as her work in the design of talent management systems and blended learning/coaching education applied to real business issues.

Her consulting work is characterized by a high degree of innovation and her clients value her ability to develop creative and affordable solutions that they can put to work quickly to get business results. She is equally comfortable at the big picture strategic level and the tactical level and adept at helping clients think visually to connect the two.

Jeannie lives in Southwest Portland with her husband. She swims daily, lifts weights and goes to yoga to stay in shape. She tunes up her understanding of leadership by reading biographies of leaders and teaching leadership development in the MBA programs at Portland State and Marylhurst University . Her favorite read of late is Freedom at Midnight which puts the leadership skills and styles of such diverse leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Lord Louis Mountbatten and Nehru under the microscope as they dealt with the eclipse of the British Raj and birth of an independent India and Pakistan in 1947.