Meet The Cygnus Sprints Team

Sean Moffitt

Sean Moffitt is a leading global authority, executive, author and keynote speaker, passionate about Customers, Brands, Technology, Innovation, Business Models and The Future. He is Managing Director of Futureproofing and was an executive strategist, technologist and marketer who has built four successful startups in the past 15 years.

Sean has published two books and sits on executive boards. He connects the dots to the future and leaves things better than when he first showed up. Sean co-founded the Grey Swan Guild, from which Cygnus Sprints has emanated from. In 2022, he is obsessed about building out the Futureproofing Stack, 4Xing the Grey Swan Guild and hatching twelve different Cygnus Ventures.

Mitchell Halpern

Mitch Halpern is a Senior Innovation and Strategic Business Development Executive who creates multi-million-dollar new income streams from emerging and mature technologies in a broad range of industries, builds and mentors cross-functional teams that reduce time-to-market by an average of 35%, and advises companies around the world on combining design thinking, scenario planning, IP landscape analysis, and consumer trend analysis rapidly to evaluate white-space opportunities and develop platforms that reduce R&D costs by 25-50% while increasing the success rate for new products and services.

He is a featured speaker at major industry meetings and has worked with startups and the world's most diverse corporations.

John Black

Dr. John R. Black is the President of Aragon National Inc. He is a nationally recognized expert witness and "pracademic" in police practices. Dr. Black regularly presents framing, complexity, systems thinking, and insight generation leading to decisions at international conferences. He holds a Masters degree in Counter-terrorism, enrolled in a Masters of Psychology, and has a Doctorate in Business (specializing in Business Intelligence and visual information). His experience/education all involve the need to understand systems, complexity, and develop practical insight.

The interconnection of things (systems, individuals, beliefs, and similar) tempered by our lenses and frames (biases, leanings, culture) is where John spends most of his time learning and distilling insight.

Sonja Blignault

Sonja is a globally recognised thinker in the fields of sensemaking and applied complexity. She has more than two decades of experience and has a passion for helping others navigate uncertainty and make sense of complexity.

Sonja is a sought-after speaker and facilitator.

She has worked across many industries and sectors and also has links to several academic institutions. 

Joe Britto

Mindset consultant, psychological coach, thinker, speaker, and writer – Joe Britto has worked with a wide range of leadership teams across non-profit, public, and private sectors to develop real-world solutions to their toughest challenges.

Author of "The Six Attributes of a Leadership Mindset" (Crown House Publishing, 2019), Joe works in the areas of leadership, change management, strategy, culture change, and equity.

Alexandra Brown

Alex Brown is a corporate communications executive who has been an early employee in launching and building the company story, brand, partnerships, and communities for innovative start-ups and globally disruptive companies in consumer tech, entertainment, social media and e-publishing. She has expertise in developing a company’s story and training and prepping executives for media/industry appearances. Alex is an advisor to the Canadian Film Centre’s “5th Wave” business accelerator, and was a mentor in Canadian Women in Communications. She has served on the Leadership Advisory Council of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics; as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of OntarioCreates. Alex also produces and hosts her podcast, “Getting it Wrong".

Sam Brown

Sam is a multi-dimensional business consultant focused on ESG & corporate accountability, responsible innovation in technology development, governance models for emerging technologies, and business strategy, change management, and communications. Sam has experience across multiple sectors, from financial technology to international human rights, technology to local community businesses. She is a wanderer between worlds who brings a variety of methodologies, mindsets and insights together to address business problems in meaningful ways. She sits on Advisory Boards for many businesses, leading institutions, and partnerships who look at the intersection of innovation and society.

Doyle Buehler

Doyle Buehler is a world authority on digital transformation, a best selling author, podcaster, teacher and entrepreneur. He has consulted, coached, taught and inspired many in the areas of digital leadership, marketing, social selling, social media marketing & strategy. He designs, develops & deploys high performing digital foundations & models for businesses to transform how they deliver their value in this disruptive, digital economy.

Doyle plays at the intersections of strategy and innovation, and has spent the past 20 years in the business world with multiple businesses and startups from around the world. He positions leaders to think in a clearer, logical, more strategic manner for evolving their business.

Lorena Dexter Chaichian

Lorena Dexter Chaichian is a strategic leader and seasoned writer with two decades of experience in communications, marketing, brand development, editing, government relations and social media/web content creation. She offers communications counsel to progressive organizations. Lorena is also a published creative writer and podcaster for another Cygnus Venture podcast at the OmniFuture.com. She specializes in not-for-profit and higher education communications and educational program development.

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She is a creative copy writer and strategic planner, architect for advocacy campaigns, special events, public dialogue and brands. She is an expert facilitator and host of online panels and forums.

She is currently a director of Communications and Media Relations at the UBC Sauder School of Business.

Luke Chilone

Luke Chilone is a business results-first technology executive specializing in digital product delivery, creating new business capabilities and operational improvement programs. As a consultant he advises leaders on digital transformation initiatives. Recently, he developed the strategic framework for rapid adoption of agile product management in health care, partnered with executive teams to identify challenges and opportunities, defined the future state operating model, and helped document a comprehensive set of sprints.

He previously led global software solution design and development teams at Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley, and TD Ameritrade. Luke also led the Digital Innovation Lab technology group at CVS Health and was responsible for Financial Services Client Delivery at Unqork.

Al Comeaux

Al has spent more than two decades on senior leadership teams at the tops of large divisions and well-known companies. His passion is in sharing what he’s learned about culture, values and change from studying scores of change efforts across industries while also leading numerous transformation initiatives, including CEO transitions, an IPO, a leveraged buyout, startups inside large companies, and even a hostile takeover. He shares what he’s learned in a bestselling book, in keynote speeches and an online training series—all so organizations can flourish rather than wasting money and time, so leaders don’t spoil their reputations on failed change, and so his own children can someday work for change-adept organizations.

Akash Das

Akash has over a decade of multidisciplinary experience comprising fashion & systems design, speculative & futures research, strategic planning, CMI research, visual communications and branding, with education at the crux. He specializes in horizon scanning and cross-connecting socio-cultural signals to potential innovation opportunities, to help generate industrially viable and beyond-human-centred holistic designs.

Along with consulting for clients such as The Future Laboratory, The Futurist and TrendVision, Akash has built MeWeStudioX, a newly-formed design-tank and strategic foresight consultancy studio, and leads Speculative & Futures Lab at ISDI, Mumbai — in collaboration with Parsons School of Design. Akash is also MD/Head of Foresights for the Radar Collection Series, another Cygnus Venture.

Dave de Bakker

Dave de Bakker operates as a Research Lead and Innovation Strategist driven to find new ways to solve old issues. He has worked to deliver meaningful answers to societal challenges within NGOs, governmental institutes and social organizations. Dave's creative & analytical skills, and extensive knowledge of behavior, enables him to synthesize organizational processes and human needs into effective solutions. He's able to move up and down levels of abstraction with ease and think in long-term to create strategies that guide actions today and reach goals tomorrow.

Through an extensive array of projects, he masters the public sector, B2C and B2B. Dave is MD Insights for another Cygnus Venture - Weathervanes.

Jeff DeChambeau

Jeff DeChamnbeau is a strategist, research analyst and community builder, As founder of Dobson Telescope, Jeff has operated a think tank, incubator + consultancy with expertise ranging from business strategy to technology to story, memes + culture. He builds tools to advance the leading edge and stories to do better work faster. Jeff started out as a think tank research analyst and a few years later was running communications for a mid-size IT company. He turned his interest to memes, story & software and has been combining them in new, useful & interesting ways ever since. Recent projects have focused on injecting new functionality into tools to remove tedium for critical processes.

Jon Denn

Jonn Denn is focused on strategically better outcomes. As a CEO coach and thinking partner He can help you get a beat your goals from day one. In the public sector, his SaaS platform is the first and only nonpartisan decision making software. In the private sector, he chairs private advisory boards for business owners, executives, and CEOs. For others, he coaches productivity and strategy wand is author of DRUMBEAT Business Productivity.

He leverages his deep business experience which ranges from hotel chain CEO, award-winning CMO, financial analyst, entrepreneur, health coach, productivity expert and author, facilitator and business mentor.

He is a Royal Society Fellow, and a Nantucket Project Fellow.

Kheeran Dharmawardena

Kheeran is a socio-technical analyst and strategist looking at the social, organisational, and institutional aspects that influence services, how they are built and adopted. He enjoys designing creative solutions for complex technical, social and environmental systems.

Kheeran holds an MBA from Monash University.

Debbie Dimoff

Debbie Dimoff combines business expertise from a track record as a corporate executive, management consultant, and start-up experimenter, to help clients accelerate business success. She is Managing Partner at Growing Legends. a transformation consultancy focused on helping leaders, teams, and companies make big change happen. Debbie is a leadership and management consultant, facilitator, and speaker. Debbie’s leadership background is in financial, communications and professional services across innovative business solutions, banking, enterprise technology, digital communications, and wealth management.

With a lively sense of humour and creative mindset, her clients enjoy her process and results. Debbie's specializes in: integrated customer solutions, leadership team effectiveness, digital transformation, marcom, strategy development and business planning.

Kristina Dryža

Kristina Dryža is a social anthropologist, trend forecaster, archetypal consultant and author. She has always been fascinated by patterns. She has tracked the patterns on the streets and in the marketplace. Kristina discovers unconscious patterns that are repeated and sometimes overlooked and the underlying causes of the present situation. She is a powerful speaker forming narratives around archetypes so that the audience can readily recognise the universal patterns of human nature. She is passionate about exploring what’s uncertain, unchartered and unrevealed. She perceives the patterns in the collective unconscious and their expression within our psyches, society and media. Kristina offers individuals insights into their human journey as well as supporting organisations on their creative path.

Howard Fields

Howard Fields is a founder, consultant, executive, educator, and podcaster. He has focused on the intersection of human behavior and emerging technology in senior positions at IBM, Cisco, and multiple startups. His insights, strategies, and tactics have transformed client business models, sales/service relationships, and performance drivers. Howard has launched and scaled new businesses and brings a pragmatic, future-focused mindset to engagements spanning strategy, marketing/sales, channels, product management, service delivery, and IT.

Howard has led game-changing initiatives including the earliest “Work from Anywhere” program,  commercialization of speech/pen recognition, the first global Resilience consulting practice, and the launch of 16 Global Innovation Centers. He holds a BA and an MBA from Rutgers University.

Julia Freeland

Julia Freeland is a change engineer, executive coach, and the founder of Revolve You, a company dedicated to helping individuals learn to harness human nature so they can thrive in uncertainty and change. She is the creator of the Humergence CODE and the author of the best-selling book "Take Your Shoes Off First: A story about a simple idea with the power to change everything." As a formally trained engineer and educator who has spent her life helping others unlock their ability to adapt and get through the hard parts of life easier, her approach to personal and professional development is unique. Unlike many in the field, she believes that aligning learning, leadership and organizational systems with human nature and building on human experience is the key to achieving breakthroughs in work and life.

Heather Galbraith

Heather Galbraith builds city resilience by weaving in futures thinking and a resilience lens into city decision making. Her current focus is to build a Future Focused Strategic Foresight Program for municipal government. She uses practical and creative tools to enhance the customer experience, cultivate future readiness and challenge existing assumptions about the future. Heather is driven to advance a more resilient future by building corporate capacity to understand the implications of emerging stresses, shocks and opportunities and to identify the policy or strategy gaps that need to be addressed in order to achieve outcomes.

Heather is a MEDes (Planning) graduate and has experience in Community Planning and Emergency & Continuity Management.

Nathan Gilliatt

Nathan Gilliatt is a technology-oriented analyst and strategist with a knack for identifying and communicating the value of innovations. For more than 25 years, he has bridged the gap between technologists and everybody else, translating tech to human and connecting dots across domains.

A high-level thinker with an eye for detail, Nathan asks the simple questions that lead to discovering gaps in plans and opportunities.

As a Principal of Social Target, Nathan has been involved in market awareness, product/portfolio review, market-entry strategy, competitor & trend analysis. and strategy consulting in social media and intelligence-related technology businesses.

As a committed generalist, he is always learning and exploring new areas of knowledge.

Alan Hayes

Alan Hayes offers depth and breadth of expertise in the full suite of sustainability and ESG issues, developed in food and grocery yet transferable to other sectors. Supporting major organisations at leadership and executive levels through his facilitation and strategy skills has been a major focus of Alan. He delivers due diligence for global investors in various sectors. Alan excels in facilitation, especially creating safe spaces for collaboration, learning and innovation, strategy development, issue identification, problem definition and solving.

His involvement in sustainability goes back to childhood - growing up on a dairy farm, seeing the growth of a world class business from the ground up, literally.

Jennifer He

Jennifer is a senior business strategy and marketing professional with 25 years international experience, expertise in insights research, strategic planning, and growth strategies. Clients benefit from her human-centered approach to problem solving. Her cross industry experience includes tech, financial services and retail in both large organizations and start-ups (commercializing R&D).

Jennifer holds an MBA from Rotman at University of Toronto, and a BA from Shanghai International Studies University.

Brock Hinzmann

Brock Hinzeman is steeped in over four decades of futures research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and spin-off strategic planning consulting companies. Brock is a master of horizon scanning, scenarios development, innovation/opportunity discovery, and technology roadmapping.

As the Chairman of the Silicon Valley Node of The Millenium Project, Brock anticipates the future and identifies new business opportunities, consulting in the heart of Silicon Valley for international corporate and national government clients. His skill balances various perspectives from trends in technology, social and market demand, and competing business models to make sense of emergent trends. Recent projects include the future of megacities, technologies in work and agriculture, additive manufacturing, aerospace innovation, and university programs in environmental studies.

Scott Howard

Scott is passionate about working with emerging innovative projects to drive value. Focused on go-to-market and shared value creation, Scott designs, builds, and delivers Revenue Engines.

Scott has past experience working with both Fortune 500 and Small Business; delivering business transformation through strategy, technology, and revenue operations.

Scott has worked with the earliest stage ventures helping them achieve first revenues, business strategy, and Seed funding since 2009. Since 2017, Scott has gone 'down the rabbit hole' on web3, and data as the future of commerce, founding or contributing at the earliest stages to multiple startups-projects across the industry.

Whatever the technology paradigm, Scott believes Client-Stakeholder-Community Success is the value to be created.

Samrah Kazmi

Samrah Kazmi is an award-winning risk and corporate innovation consultant. She has been named a top regtech and fintech influencer. She is the Chief Innovation Officer at RESRG, an innovation risk advisory and also the co-founder/COO of an alternative data startup. A trusted advisor to boards and C-level executives, Samrah spent two and a half decades in leadership roles on Wall Street. She helps organizations effectively manage the risks of change, disruption and innovation. She has executed historic mergers, corporate divestitures and risk transformation. Samrah is an engaging public speaker, advisor to HBR and member of Entrepreneur’s Leadership Network. Passionate about the environment, Samrah is the founder of a global community advocating for sustainability in the innovation ecosystem.

Stephanie Kusibab

Stephanie Kusibab is the CEO at Essentiam, a strategy consultancy. Stephanie has more than twenty years’ experience assisting clients in the B2B, B2C and professional services with a focus on high level business vision and strategy. Through lateral thinking she quickly assesses situations and identifies growth opportunities across industry. She believes the most powerful ideas come from bringing people together. She helps organizations tackle high-stakes conversations, mine diverse perspectives, generate new ideas, build teams, and understand opportunities.

Prior to Essentiam, Stephanie led the consulting team at SmithBucklin, working with boards and executive teams to move industries, She and was responsible for strategic planning and go-to-market activities for large divisions/global teams.

Mercedes Baltazar Lobato

Mercedes Baltazar Lobato is a teacher and co-founder of Meraki, a boutique strategy consultancy in Mexico, and updated her crisis management past with Futures Design. She works at the interesection of foresight, strategy and reputation with public and private organizations in Latin America, through consulting and research projects. She believes that narratives are far from being a "soft asset" and occupy a fundamental place in the strategy of a company. Mercedes is a member of the Worlds Futures Federation Society. She also teaches at diverse universities like Tec de Monterrey, Universidad Iberoamericana, and Mindway; and participates as a guest analyst on CNN, El Financiero Bloomberg and El Universal among other media outlets.

Aaron Mikulsky

Aaron’s functions at a C-Level in the areas of strategy, business transformation and operational excellence. His motto is: Learn, Lead, Inspire, Encourage, Equip, Execute. Aaron is a Juran Global, certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He has served on numerous non-profit boards and is also an AMAP Coach. Aaron is an accomplished Senior Executive with more than 25 years of corporate success. His broad areas of expertise include: Strategy Development /Execution, Agile Development, Organizational Structure Redesign, Change Management leadership, and Innovative Cultures. He is a valuable advisor for organizations experiencing challenges around growth, business models, strategies and risk.

Aaron is founder of Love 2 Lead Consulting Services and author of two books.

Louise Mowbray

Louise Mowbray is the Managing Director of Mowbray by Design, the Creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. She specialises in working with purpose-driven leaders, to develop themselves and their organisations. She creates unique opportunities out of change and transformation, approaches the future through a broader systems lens and builds experimental cultures of innovation and great places to work.

Louise is a professional coach, thought-partner, advisor, facilitator and speaker. She designs and delivers leadership engagements for clients, is associate faculty and visiting lecturer for a number of executive development and business schools. Louise's previous career includes working for listed companies in the investment banking, technology and co-founding an executive search firm in London.

Jill Nephew

Jill Nephew brings her rich background in enterprise business application and integration software to bear on the most important challenge of the day, how to create tools that interface with human tacit knowledge and facilitate individual and collective insights that are fundamental to navigating complexity. Her company, inqwire.io, has developed comprehensive tools and training that unlock, and enhance these latent and largely untapped sensemaking abilities.

Lauren Nignon

With decades of experience in graphic/web design and a Masters degree from Harvard in Digital Media Management, Lauren Nignon knows how to find and harness the right talent, maintain a high level of coherence among diverse minds and people, and manage digital media projects with lots of moving parts. She has a long-term interest in deep innovation and collective intelligence, and was the Co-Founder of CICOLAB, a CI experimental lab with a robust knowledge repository. Her specialty areas are discoverability, designing and facilitating processes, and knowledge ecology. She developed intelligence-based methodologies for business incubation at scale including techniques for: advanced knowledge synthesis, cultures of experimentation and new formats to spread organisational learnings.

Justin O'Heir

Justin has spent the past 15 years building, launching, and leading award-winning global technology platforms. A highly driven self-starter who has built businesses, founded innovative platforms, and led teams to reach billions of users and generate multi-millions of revenue.

John Reaves

John Reaves has four decades of experience at the intersection of innovation, product development marketing, and program design. He focuses on connecting communities to their future(s) through co-design and systems thinking. He is adept at building ecosystems by connecting people, partners and stakeholders. John leverages design thinking + systems thinking + futures thinking in the context of new technologies and process models. He blends structured face-to-face interaction with digital platforms to deepen dialogue and co-create real-world solutions.

John founded LinkedIn's Design Thinking + Systems Thinking group. He has worked with global corporations, universities, museums, government agencies, non-profits and community groups pursuing societal challenges and global, sustainability, and resilience goals.

Es Rottschafer

Es Rottschafer is a multi-disciplinary, high fidelity strategist working across the areas of brand, foresight, business design and customer experience. She has over 20 years of experience working at an executive level with global and Canadian clients across many categories. Es is a certified facilitator, design sprint master and systems thinker. She practices the disruptive design method for problem loving, human centre design research and uses a diverse toolkit for sensemaking and trend management.

Rob Salkowitz

Rob Salkowitz is an internationally-recognized expert in the intersection of digital media and social and business trends. He has worked with clients ranging from international corporations, governments and NGOs to small businesses and early-stage startups to engage with specialized audiences, identify new opportunities and articulate their vision for the future. Rob is the author/editor of six books, contributor to business publications,faculty for the University of Washington Communication Leadership Graduate Program, and co-founder of several companies including digital marketing firm MediaPlant. Rob writes regular columns on the business of entertainment and popular culture for Forbes, Publishers Weekly and ICv2. He speaks at events gloablly, keynoting at consumer/trade shows, moderating panels and presenting original research.

Susan Schramm

Susan Schramm helps CEOs, boards, and leadership teams drive high-stakes strategies for faster results and more confident leadership. She serves as a “strategy accelerator”, an ally for senior leaders frustrated strategies are going too slow or worried they are getting off the rails. Susan has held executive roles with IBM, Siemens, Nokia, and Viavi Solutions and serves on many boards. Susan is founder of Go to Market Impact, a consultancy uncovering the hidden risks of their strategy, aligning the organization, and driving results. Recent engagements include: optimizing diverse supply chains, accelerating public safety innovation, readying the workforce of the future, implementing secure smart cities, and equipping purpose-led entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses.

Ni'coel Stark

Ni’coel Stark is head of Stark Innovations focused on corporate intelligence, customer strategy, leadership development and future adaptation. She focuses on three innovative business foundations: Ontology over Product; Wonder over Information; and Relational Resiliency.

Her work exposes how these foundations will power the future of culture, human systems, and innovation. She helps individuals and brands innovate the way we organize and the way we make decisions.

Ni’coel's was a founder of one of the first blockchain exclusive VC funds and is an Enneagram expert. She has two award-winning documentary films, and is currently working with edgy leaders, artists, and technologists to advance the future of decision intelligence, innovation, and culture-making.

Bud Taylor

Bud Taylor is an executive advisor, global management consultant, author of Customer Driven Change and change/ innovation speaker. Having worked at blue chip consultancies, he is the founder of Customer-Driven Change.

He works with executives to unleash the pent up capability in their organizations. Bud's clients are global and mid-market marquee companies looking to implement innovative, customer centric ideas that transform them from followers to disruptors. He has in-market experience in the US & Canada; Korea, Singapore, & China; Brazil & Mexico; France, Italy, Switzerland, & the UK; Bud recognizes he is not learning at his client's expense. He will work with teams to accelerate change by surgically removing embedded inertia.

Andrew Tischler

Andrew is a former McKinsey Consultant, trained lawyer an entrepreneur. He loves making clarity and alignment in chaos. Having a wide variety of exposure to corporates, scaleups and startups, he had led processes and P&Ls for for-profit and not-for-profit. Andrew is values-driven, the Why of the thing matters, and he likes helping people by organizing and finding clarity in the seemingly disorganized or unattainable.

His mission is to enable vision by working with inspiring people, purposes and organizations. Andrew enjoys facilitation and presentation/speaking. Always happy to help an organization who is aligned take an organization to levels of clarity and get higher motivation to drive towards clear vision & goals.

Denise Tsang

Denise works with clients to uncover value and wisdom in their data. A strategic thinker, Denise brings a pragmatic, business-centric approach to complex problems.

In addition to an MBA in Management Information Systems and Entrepreneurship and Marketing, Denise holds multiple certifications in leadership and software sales.

Rob Tyrie

Rob Tyrie is a full stack enterprise software specialist and serial entrepreneur. He specializes in the creation and implementation in large scale programs and partnerships to create software-driven revenue and relationships for B2B businesses. He leads teams in ideation and design of systems that scale in enterprise deployment across Financial Services and Industry Sectors. In the last 20 years he has gone deep and wide, where among a set of start ups, he was the global lead for insurance at Salesforce.

Rob is co-founder of the Grey Swan Guild with an insatiable curiosity for making sense of the world. He is an angel investor and advisor in new technology companies.

Hannelie Venucia

Hannelie Venucia has a passion for human and organizational potential, the founder of Joy Generation and The Inspiration Gap, a Leadership and Creative Innovation Consultancy, and Thrivability Incubator. She started her career in Human Resources of a major Bank, and thereafter as a Recruitment Consultant, performing psychometric testing and stimulating her intuitive abilities.

Hannelie has years of Management, Change Management, Creative Innovation, Business, IT, HR, Leadership, and Strategy Consulting experience, across 4 continents. An international public speaker, workshop creator, and change facilitator, Hannelie has created and facilitated Innovation, Creativity, Leadership, and Sensemaking events, workshops, and programs around the world, conducting 131 workshops and 13 courses over the past 10 years.

Robert Walton

Robert Walton works with boards, investors, CEOs and CFOs to address KPI underperformance anywhere in the value chain, applying lessons learned through extensive Operational Excellence experience with Fortune 100 companies. He is currently an Operating Partner at United Generations Capital (UGC), a purpose-driven PE firm investing in the healthcare technology sector. He conducts due diligence,Operational Audits and sources deals. His prior executive assignments include COO at heath care companies, President/GM at an enterprise eervices division and SVP/VPs in health care, tech and insurance. He worked with Steve Jobs twice, once at NeXT Computer and again at Steve's request for Pixar.Robert’s completed the Stanford Executive Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Lisa Whitsett

Lisa Whitsett is award-winning consultant with 24 years of experience among the Big Four. She specializes in talent strategy, leadership development, organizational development, and solution design with Fortune/Global 500s. Lisa has experience with all client levels, including CEOs and top teams. She has a track record of strong client partnerships in matrixed environments and industry experience in telecom, energy, and retail. Lisa co-leads a facility management company. She received her bachelor's degree in sociology with a law emphasis from the University of California at San Diego with a certificate in foresight from the University of Houston. She is currently combining metaphysics; the mind, cognition, intelligence; philosophy of science and tech; and complex systems in her studies.

Gordon Withrow

Gordon Withrow is an executive consultant and Principal of Gordon Withrow & Company, providing digital and organizational transformation leadership at scale.

A seasoned veteran who leads businesses from where they are to where they want to be, Gordon moves teams from strategy to action to realize value. He prides himself on a people-first approach to getting things done. Gordon served 25 years as an executive consultant with an international consultancy, and as leader within a Fortune 100 company. He has led organizational change and business transformation with a variety of organizations.

Most recently, Gordon has been leading deep learning artificial intelligence efforts and building expertise as an AI futurist.

Paula Ylisassi

Paula is an experienced digital age business leader and entrepreneur, thinker and advisor. What makes Paula unique as a business / strategy / leadership advisor, is her ability to challenge the status quo in a straightforward and honest way, while being empathetic, engaging and inspiring.