Please click a name for a full biography:

Ron Crossland

Ron has worked with talent from the boiler room to the boardroom, a range of experience that has taught him that regardless of position, work matters to people. He has helped individuals, teams, and organizations to develop better leaders, create more innovation, forge better internal and external relationships, and inspire greater performance.

He has been an organizational consultant and educator since 1985. Whether delivering a keynote or engaged with a small group over an extended workshop experience, Ron blends science and art, data and philosophy, with theory and practicality to achieve an enviable goal for educators: help leaders find practical applications they can use right away as well as prompt them to reconsider their longer term positions and practices.

Ron is a writer, an intuitionist, a factoid junkie, and a research synthesizer. He is a speaker for company meetings, industry association events, and other venues. Ron received his BS in Electronic Engineering Technology (1975) and his MBA (1977) from Oklahoma State University.

Ron has served as a Director of Tom Peters Company, in both US and UK based businesses.

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Helen Green

Raised in English Shire country in a close family of scientists, Helen quickly became a black sheep for choosing to study Hotel and Catering Management at Surrey University rather than follow a career path into a laboratory or clinic! Helen worked for ten years in the UK hospitality industry, first as a line manager and then in people development with two large brewing organizations. She was also a Communications Manager with a German franchise organization.

Her business experience to date has given Helen a balanced appreciation of hard-headed business realities and a basic belief in productivity through people. Helen has been a member of the Tom Peters Company team since 1996, and she has worked with clients across a broad range of industries.

Her basic thesis: most organizations barely touch the true potential of their people. This theme characterises her approach to all of her work.

Having been brought up on a diet of competitive sports from equestrianism to squash, Helen still keeps alive her many interests outside of work. She is especially proud of her participation in the 2001 London Marathon for the British Kidney Patients Association.

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Richard King
Managing Director, International

It was a sign of things to come when Richard was sent home from his first scout camp at age 11 after an altercation with his patrol leader. Always an independent minded lad, he played youth soccer internationally at 14, had bought himself a Lambretta and fashioned himself a “mod” by 16, and now lists Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, and Alf Ramsey amongst his leadership heroes.

It might be a stretch to claim that Richard’s post graduate study of Tribology (friction, wear and lubrication) at Brunel University has been the secret to his success in helping individuals and teams to work more productively. He has certainly been effective at harnessing the “creative abrasion” in the businesses he works with. His East London roots, working class upbringing and an early career spent in industrial relations in the automotive industry have served him well in learning how to relate to and deal with a wide variety of business leaders working in extremely challenging situations.

Now well into his second decade in Tom Peters Company, Richard focuses on performance improvement through people. He works strategically with leaders and business teams who know that “making the work matter” to people is the key to performance improvement and building sustained success in so many tough situations. His work life is founded on an ability to build strong relationships with clients and colleagues around him, and he takes great pride in the longevity of his relationships with senior people in the likes of Rolls-Royce, Virgin, Sainsbury’s, Avon, Royal Bank of Scotland and Rank Group.

In his private life, Richard is a passionate West Ham fan and an equally passionate avoider of all things related to DIY. He lives with his wife Sue in Billericay in Essex and maintains a wide social circle, which definitely includes his sons Will and Tom who have both returned to their home locality after University.

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Madeleine McGrath
Managing Director, International

Madeleine considers herself a misfit from an artistic background. Graduating from Leeds University in Yorkshire with an honors degree in music, she pondered a career in singing before coming to her senses at the last minute! Instead, being the daughter of two educators, she chose to specialise in her second obsession - helping people develop their talent. She worked in personnel and organisation in the manufacturing industry as a young adult, but she escaped with an excellent reputation, eight years of hands-on experience, and her passion for learning intact! After meeting Tom Peters at one of his legendary Skunk Camps in 1988, she’s been working with his businesses ever since.

Working first as a joint venture partner in the UK, and then as a Director in the London Office of Tom Peters Group, Madeleine has been a main player in the development of learning and development programs that sit alongside Tom’s ideas on business excellence. Designing workshops that connect Tom’s ideas with work realities is her real forte. People find them fun, challenging, hard work, and worthwhile. Madeleine has had a hand in the development of many of the implementation tools and programs that are at the root of Tom Peters Company’s work in businesses such as Virgin, The Amtico Company, The One Account, Princes Group, and Rolls-Royce Aerospace.

In her spare time Madeleine takes herself far too seriously. She is an active member of the BBC Symphony Chorus, appearing annually on the television during the Promenade season. She is also a student of the Alexander Technique and a director of a major UK charity. In her other spare moments, Madeleine is studying for her MA in Open & Distance Learning!

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Mike Neiss

Michael T. Neiss specializes in leadership and talent development. For the past twenty years, Mike has educated, coached, and counseled leaders at all levels worldwide. His primary focus is helping organizations and the leaders therein grow their leadership strength, and therefore, the capability to create and sustain change.

Mike’s background and experience in operations management at United Parcel Service, CMS Energy, and General Motors give him a real world perspective and a practical approach that clients love. He prides himself on becoming a trusted advisor to his clients, and most of his clients are long term partners.

Mike has been associated with the tompeters!company for eight years. As an Sr Consultant he develops and delivers experiences that help organizations attain excellence using the research and writings of Tom Peters. Michael is also a Master Facilitator of the Leadership Challenge, based on the great work of Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.

His clients cross over many classes of organizations from profit to nonprofit to government. Mike recently partnered with professionals within Herman Miller, Inc to develop and implement a leadership strategy that was recognized as a national Optima Award winner for leadership development. He combines experience, academic learning, and research with the dirt under the fingernails practicality that comes from a career that included first line supervision to executive positions.

Mike is a graduate of Michigan State University and completed postgraduate studies at Aquinas College. Along with his passion for improving organizational performance, he also loves golf and rock and roll, although he is not nearly as skilled in those areas. Michael makes his home with his wife, Pam, and assorted members of the animal kingdom in beautiful South Haven, Michigan.

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Chris Nel

Not many business consultants can boast of having 20 grams of steel plates & screws in their bodies! But Chris has used his experience in competitive sports and military training (he has broken his spine twice at the same point) to toughen him to the challenges of business. He has competed on the British Triathlon team and been an officer with the Royal Marine Commandos—seeing service in Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Norway, Belize, Brunei and more recently in the first Gulf conflict—before bringing his leadership experience into civilian life.

Chris spent four years as an operations manager, culminating in a regional management role for one of the major FTSE 100 businesses. There he recognised the importance of focusing leadership on both the systems and the passion side of business. In his time with the Tom Peters Company he has applied this learning to more than 25 major client projects, including ASDA, CPP, Lloyds of London, Norwich Union, Rolls-Royce Aerospace, Sainsbury’s, TMP Worldwide, Texas Instruments, Unilever, Virgin One Account, and Zurich Financial Services. He has also been doing speaking engagements in the Balkan nations on creating an entrepreneurial spirit in organisations.

Chris’s basic approach is to build trusting relationships, understand the client business, and to clarify required outcomes. This he sees as essential to surviving the inevitably bumpy ride of business transformation and “getting beyond partnership to provocation” wherein real value is added. His style, as expected from someone with his background, is energetic, pragmatic, and results-obsessed.

When not at work, Chris lives amphibiously—and his definition of happiness always involves water.

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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 organization, 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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Tom Peters
Chairman

Fortune called Tom Peters the "Ur-guru" of management, and compares him to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and H.L. Mencken. The Economist tagged him the Uber-guru; and BusinessWeek's take on his "unconventional views" led them to label Peters "business's best friend and worst nightmare." In 2004, the Bloomsbury Press book Movers and Shakers: The 100 Most Influential Figures in Modern Business reviewed the historical contributions of pathbreaking management thinkers and practitioners, from Machiavelli and JP Morgan to Tom and Jack Welch. The summary entry on Tom's impact:

"Tom Peters has probably done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management from the confines of boardrooms, academia, and consultancies to a broader, worldwide audience, where it has become the staple diet of the media and managers alike. Peter Drucker has written more and his ideas have withstood a longer test of time, but it is Peters—as consultant, writer, columnist, seminar lecturer, and stage performer—whose energy, style, influence, and ideas have shaped new management thinking."

When Tom & Bob Waterman wrote In Search of Excellence 25 years ago, they introduced the world of business to the idea and value of Excellence per se as an inspiring and profitable aspiration—at a time when America's competitiveness was under fullblown assault. The world and management practice have changed in the years following Search, and although the companies profiled have adapted remarkably well along the way, the challenges today are more daunting than ever. Excellence as a way of life and an unmatchable competitive advantage has never been more important

In 1999, Search was honored by NPR as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century"—and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a 2002 poll by Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing. Tom followed Search with over a dozen additional international bestsellers. Among them: A Passion for Excellence (1985, with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos (1987); Liberation Management (1992: acclaimed as the "Management Book of the Decade" for the '90s); the millennium troika in 1999 on Reinventing Work in the face of new global competition (The Brand You50, The Project50, and The Professional Service Firm50); and, in 2003, the provocative, colorful Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. He is currently working on a book that renews and strengthens his clarion call for Excellence.

Two Tom Peters biographies have been published: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon and Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution (part of a four-book series of business biographies on Peters, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, and Warren Buffet). In a 2002 in-depth analytic study, Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change scored Peters 2nd among the top 50 "Business Intellectuals."

Tom, who is widely credited with almost single-handedly launching the "management guru industry," now billions of dollars in size, writes, reflects, and then presents some 60 or so major seminars each year, more than half outside the U.S. He estimates that since 1978, when the work on Search began, he's given about 2,500 speeches, flown 5,000,000+ miles, spoken before 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 people, and presented in 47 states and 63 countries. Since 2004, Tom also has devoted significant energy to his award-winning (a “Top 500” designation) blog—www.tompeters.com.

Leadership guru Warren Bennis, the only person close to both Tom and the late Peter Drucker, told a reporter, "If Peter Drucker invented modern management, Tom Peters vivified it." In fact, as even Tom's book titles indicate, his passion is passion: Destruction & Re-imaginings ... liberating talent for a hypercompetitive world ... the Herculean task of sustaining Entrepreneurial Excellence. Among Tom’s newer passions & provocations are: Women-as-Leaders particularly suited for these times; the supreme role of Design in differentiation; gaining advantage in the enormous, underserved market represented by Women (controllers of 3/4 of the world’s wealth) and the burgeoning, financially potent Boomer-Geezer population. Now, Tom is once again pursuing, with characteristic determination ... Excellence, variety 2007. "There is no higher aim," he says, "than the relentless pursuit of Excellence. On the 25th anniversary of our book, I am re-dedicating myself to the search that began in 1982. That is: The search continues ..."

Born in Baltimore in 1942 with lacrosse stick in his hands, and residing in Silicon Valley from 1970–2000, Tom now lives on a 1,600-acre working farm in Vermont with his wife, the artist and entrepreneur Susan Sargent. He is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.) and earned an MBA and Ph.D. at Stanford; he holds honorary doctorates from several institutions, including the University of San Francisco and, oddly, the State University of Management in Moscow. In the U.S. Navy from 1966–1970, he made two deployments to Vietnam (as a Navy Seabee) and "survived a tour in the Pentagon." He was a White House drug-abuse advisor in 1973–74, and then worked at McKinsey & Co. from 1974–1981, becoming a Partner and Organization Effectiveness practice leader in 1979.

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David Pilbeam

David Pilbeam is a specialist coach and facilitator who works with individuals and teams helping them to deliver concrete results. A specialist in individual and organisation performance change, David has a Masters Degree in Coaching and Mentoring Practice. His tough questioning approach enables people to evaluate their options and to build their confidence to face up to challenges and to deliver on agreed commitments.

David began his working life teaching Physical Education, spending three years in Malawi, and two in Portugal, working in International Schools. He then moved into the hospitality industry in Hong Kong, where the challenge of working in a new industry in another radically different culture taught him a lot about himself and the demands of leadership in a results driven environment.

Back in the UK, David became Operations Director for a health and leisure club start-up. Over the course of the next five years the business was created, developed and sold with six operating clubs and over 300 staff. David then joined Tom Peters Company where he works with individuals and teams on delivering change and overcoming personal and organisational challenges.

David has worked on projects for both large and small organisations, including: Texas Instruments, Rolls-Royce, Applied Biosystems, Orange, M&S, Cybex international, Nautilus, CPP, Libra Bank and Aerofill Dawson. This work has covered UK, mainland Europe and USA. He is an accredited Master Facilitator of The Leadership Challenge Workshop and is a Full Member of the Association for Coaching.

David is a sports fanatic, particularly cricket, football, rugby, cycling and athletics, though these days a young family and a dodgy back restrict his participation to running and triathlon events, and the occasional game of golf!

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LJ Rose

She’s a world traveller. 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.

Robert Thompson

Like you, leadership expert and business author Robert Thompson has seen the word leadership defined numerous ways over the years. Is it charisma and positive thinking? Pinstripes and red power ties? Decisiveness? Is it all about the situation? Is it meant only for the chosen few who rise to the top? Or, is there a different story?

With over three decades of executive coaching, speaking, and most importantly, real-life, in-the-trenches business experience, his view is radically different. Robert appreciates, and shares with listeners, that leadership is a moment-to-moment choice and not about title, tenure or position. Leadership is for everyone, everyday. It's how we should live our life.

Robert, sometimes referred to as the “Provocateur” for his ability to stir up a group or as the “People Whisperer” for his coaching skill that brings out the best in people, is known for his practical, street-savvy style; Robert's fusion of real-life stories and his conversational techniques connect with his audience at an intimate, intense and individual level.

Robert has served as a senior consultant with the U.S. based Tom Peters Company for several years. He is a Certified Master Facilitator of the The Leadership Challenge Workshop™, and continues to work with the best and brightest in the leadership development field.
The author of the best selling, The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable, Thompson's penetrating conversations have been shared with folks from around the globe.

His successes include: AT&T, Amgen, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, Qwest, Sony, Sun Microsystems, The Cheesecake Factory, The Gap, Visa and numerous U.S. city, state and federal agencies to name a few.

Prior to his leadership efforts, Robert, a journalist by education and passion, created, managed, and sold a successful U.S. regional newspaper publishing company and a national advertising sales company. As the founder of a corporate nonprofit exchange program for aspiring post-communist business professionals, Robert attained a key role in the Clinton-Yeltsin “Business for Russia” initiative. He has served on the board of advisors for a successful Internet start-up company and assisted the group through their initial public offering

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Ruth Smith

Ruth has been called a “terrier” for snapping at the heels of people who don’t take accountability for their own actions. Her consulting style is pragmatic, combining a natural empathy and interest in people with the confidence to challenge assumptions and behaviors. She has a Masters Degree in Organisation Consulting and underpins all her consulting work with credible and robust academic thinking. 

In her practice, Ruth likes to works with individuals, teams and organisations that are in transition. She helps people to create sustainable change through engaging them as active participants in that change.

Having cut her teeth in the retail and hospitality industry, where businesses live and die by the quality of the customer experience they provide, Ruth understands the importance of maintaining a strong commercial focus through developing and engaging members of the organisation. She believes that in the right environment, people can and do achieve extraordinary results.

Ruth works in a wide variety of client engagements, covering organisation development, employee engagement, leadership development, management skills, team development, and executive coaching. She is licensed in SHL testing and interpretation, and a licensed BTD facilitator (Situational Leadership, Situational Self Leadership, High Performing Teams, Gung Ho!)

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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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