Principal

Daniel Montgomery

Dan has a 30 year background as a management consultant and executive coach, and as a manager, counsellor, and trainer. His previous professional consulting experience includes work with both Accenture and Ernst & Young. Dan has been an independent coach and consultant since 2002.  He has worked with clients in a variety of industries, including technology, energy, financial services, construction and health care.   Current clients include emerging technology companies, not-for-profits, multi-sector initiatives and Fortune 100 companies.

His entertaining and provocative talks and workshops integrate emerging perspectives about business performance and valuation, leadership, and social systems into practical everyday business and personal practices.

Dan has an MBA from the University of Colorado, as well as a Masters in Psychology from Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado.  He is also a graduate of the Newfield Network’s highly regarded coaching program, and holds the Certified Management Consultant (CMC) designation. 

Dan has lived in California, Washington state, Colorado, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia (Canada), Arizona, and back to Colorado.  He is a citizen of both the US and Canada.

In parallel with his business career, Dan has been a practitioner of meditation and yoga his entire adult life.

Frequent Collaborators

Susan Skjei

Susan Skjei (“shay”) has been consulting with leaders and executive teams of businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies for over 20 years. She has a unique ability to create energetic and high trust learning environments that accelerate the achievement of practical business results while building strong, collaborative relationships.  She provides facilitation, training and coaching in the areas of leadership, strategic planning, organizational culture, and change management. 

She has designed and led large-scale change initiatives for such diverse client groups as Hewlett-Packard, Phipps Construction, Rocky Mountain HMO, The Colorado Air National Guard, StorageTek and the Mental Health Center of Boulder County.  These initiatives have included the development of core values and purpose, leadership competencies and succession planning, strategic planning, process improvement, goal alignment and organization design.  Susan is a Certified Organization Development Consultant (CODC) with Associated Consultants International.

In her last corporate position, Susan was Vice-President and Chief Learning Officer for StorageTek, a $2.4B provider of electronic storage solutions.  She was responsible for developing the learning and change management strategy for the corporation and implementing it across 40 countries and 8,500 employees worldwide.  She also implemented a virtual corporate university to provide education and training to employees, customers and partners of StorageTek throughout the world. 

Susan is also an experienced executive coach, and for the last ten years has worked closely with CEOs, executives and managers to help them articulate their personal and professional goals and to implement these goals effectively within their own organizations.  She specializes in coaching female executives and their teams and has designed and facilitated numerous leadership retreats.  Susan is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation.

Susan has a Master of Science degree from American University in Human Resource Development and is completing her Ph.D. at Fielding Graduate University.  In addition to consulting and coaching, she has designed and taught classes, workshops and conferences at Naropa University in leadership, strategic planning and organization development.  She is the founder and director of the Authentic Leadership Certificate program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, (http://www.naropa.edu/leadership) and is a founding member of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Nova Scotia http://www.shambhalainstitute.org). 

Visit Susan at www.sanesystems.com

Marsha Shenk

Marsha is a pioneer in Business Anthropology. Three decades ago, reflecting on commerce as an inescapable dimension of human life, she also noted that it is the source of a great deal of suffering.  Observing that its timeless laws are invisible to most people - including veteran business executives – she began her consulting practice.

Working with leaders from the Fortune 10 to small service firms, she has forged a unique and far-reaching approach to the questions that every enterprise faces. Her models reveal hidden dynamics:

Armed with this insight, Marsha’s Master Moves® catalyze valuable exchanges, no matter what is happening in the marketplace. Her clients lead their industries and confound competition.

Marsha founded the BestWork® People in 1980, introducing a new way of inspiring peoples’ best work.  Her models have resulted in highly profitable strategies: greatly boosting productivity and loyalty and creating new markets, products, and services. Marsha is known for using Game Theory to enable enterprises to lead the market: winning in a game that only they can see, in which others must compete.

The focus of her practice is top performance. Over the past thirty years, her work has led executives from most industries to deepen competitive gaps and sustain market leadership. Dozens of senior teams have used The Master Moves® to generate new value, sustain an appetite for improvement, and make sound decisions for investing in further learning.

Sustaining inquiry into biology, anthropology, business, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and somatics, she partners with colleagues from multiple disciplines to ensure top tier thinking. Her work has included 15 years of teaching leadership courses, and 27 of consulting, coaching, and facilitating.

Marsha’s education began at Reed College, and includes doctoral study at UCLA and Berkeley.

Visit Marsha at www.bestwork.biz