Christine Comaford
Janet Schieferdecker
Volker Frank
Bill Gates calls her “super high bandwidth.”
Bill Clinton has thanked her for “fostering American entrepreneurship.”
Newsweek says “by reputation, Christine is the person you want to partner with.”
New York Times bestselling author Christine Comaford is a specialist in Corporate Strategy, Execution and Behavioral Alignment among top executives, teams and emerging leaders. Her coaching, consulting and strategies have created hundreds of millions of dollars in new client company value and revenue. She is sought after for providing proven strategies to shift executive behavior to create more positive outcomes, enroll and align teams in times of change, massively increase sales, product offerings, and company value—yet she openly says she simply supports her clients who truly make these results happen.
CEOs, Boards and Investors count on Christine to help them:
Christine’s clients grow their businesses at surprising speeds and greatly outperform their competitors due to her expertise of 30+ years building and growing businesses and 35+ years in human behavior optimization.
As an Entrepreneur, Christine has built and sold 5 of her own businesses with an average 700% return on investment, served as a board director or in-the-trenches advisor to 36 startups, and has invested in over 200 startups (including Google) as a venture capitalist or angel investor. Christine has consulted to the White House (Clinton and Bush), 700 of the Fortune 1000, and over 300 small businesses. She has repeatedly identified and championed key trends and technologies years before market acceptance.
Christine has also led many unconventional lives, adding to her 360 Degree ability to understand business not as just a set of strategies, but also as a complex web of human interaction. She has been a: Buddhist monk, software engineer (at Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Lotus), entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Her triumphs and disasters are revealed in her New York Times (and USA Today, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Amazon.com ) bestselling business book: Rules for Renegades: How to Make More Money, Rock Your Career, and Revel in Your Individuality. The book is available at all major retailers or via www.RulesForRenegades.com.
Christine is a leadership columnist for www.Forbes.com. She has appeared on Good Morning America, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX Business Network, PBS, CNET and is frequently quoted in the business, technology and general press at large. Stanford Graduate School of Business has done two case studies on her and PBS has featured her in three specials (Triumph of the Nerds, Nerds 2.0.1, and Nerd TV). CNET has broadcast two specials covering her unconventional rise to success as a woman with neither a high school diploma nor college degree. Christine believes we can do well and do good, using business as a path for personal development, wealth creation, and philanthropy.
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Janet Schieferdecker is an executive coach and leadership skills trainer. For over 14 years she has worked with managers on increasing their performance and consequent success. Janet brings not only international business experience at the managerial level, but also deep experience in neuroscience coaching and multiple personal growth modalities. She is known for her humor, insight, and skillful reframes.
Janet’s business career started as a Financial Analyst for Nippon Steel where her management of a debt portfolio was credited with saving the company over $250,000. As Asia Regional Marketing Manager, for Philips Medical Systems her responsibilities included conducting market research in China, the results of which impacted over $5 million in joint venture investment decisions. Still with Philips, she became the Product Manager for a newly bought OEM UltraSound product line, where she grew the annual revenue from 0 to 21 million NLG in less than two years.
As a manager responsible for bottom line results, Janet was known for her ability to quickly grasp high level strategic implications as she grew business units and systematized functions. Repeatedly drawn to chaotic situations which needed quick interventions and high levels of change, Janet was selected at the age of 29 to work with senior executives on mapping strategic and organizational change and then recruiting for it. As part of that catalyst team, Janet contributed to the division’s rise from the worst performing business unit to the best.
During her 20-plus-year obsession with personal and organizational behavior and development, motivation, and results, Janet has studied and worked with some of the best communications and leadership trainers, coaches, and personal growth practitioners in the world. She quickly learned that knowing what you wanted was important, but often not enough, and delved into the realm of neuroscience, learning how to effectively re-pattern the brain to implement desired changes particularly in beliefs about self, in acquiring peak performance behaviors, and in creating a growth mindset.
Janet earned her BA in Economics and Art History (double major) in 1986 from Union College in upstate New York, and her MBA from London Business School in 1992. She became a certified NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the study and art of effective communication) Practitioner in 2000 and a certified NLP Trainer and Consultant in 2007, and is now in her 11th year of training others in using this wonderful mind science to improve their leadership skills.
Today Janet helps executives manage transition. She is considered an expert on the psychology of success, is well known for her incisive questioning and ability to perceive and highlight the most important truths of organizational situations. By helping top executives understand what is really going on, now, she is able to help them dramatically expand their future.
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Volker Frank is a high-octane synthesizer, combining business performance with human potential, systems thinking with intuition, and strategic management with organizational awareness. He brings his passions to the business world as an executive coach, leadership trainer and management consultant.
In the early 90’s, before the Internet became a household name, Volker was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany to study “learning in hypermedia” in the US. He combined his visual design education with cognitive psychology and computer systems and earned a Masters Degree in Design.
With this foundation, he worked for twelve years as a software consultant for different size companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Volker became known for his ability to organize chaos. He is able to translate the way people collaborate and organize business processes into mission-critical applications that create quantum leaps.
Here are some of Volker’s key business accomplishments:
He designed a new account management system for a financial management company, which allowed them to double their assets under management to $1 billion within twelve months.
A mid-sized market research company was able to transform their business through Volker’s redesign of their survey tools and reporting engine. It helped them to land their largest contract to date: Dell’s automated customer satisfaction surveys. This turned them from a minor player in Silicon Valley to a national force.
A construction company for cellphone towers improved their ability to track thousands of construction projects across 8 western states. This enabled them to decrease their float, the time of completing a milestone to receiving payments, from 120 to 60 days, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Working through dozens of these kinds of projects, Volker realized that the really big successes required more than superior software tools. The grand slam projects included a strong social and organizational component. That prompted him to study social systems dynamics and deepen his understanding of neuroscience, cognitive patterning and what it takes to change our minds in order to change the outcomes we create. He combines these tools with his deep understanding of strategic innovation, organizational behavior, and business process improvement.
As a German national with an international education, he has a deep understanding for the effect ‘culture’ has on the way people make sense of the world, giving him an uncanny knack for the necessary changes, leading to better outcomes and higher performance. In his work, he gets people to come together and participate in articulating the business needs and negotiate cultural differences across departmental silos. The collaboration produces dramatic business improvements.
Today, Volker facilitates trainings and workshops nationally and internationally on social systems dynamics and leadership. He coaches executives to increase their self-awareness, ability to lead others and affect changes across organizations. His clients consistently take their businesses to the next level.
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