Who We Are / History
Our parent company, Dialogos, has worked for the past 25 years to develop leaders and cultures of excellence in organizations – including national governments, multilateral development organizations, and global corporations. We have trained tens of thousands of leaders and coached CEO’s of F500 companies, Prime Ministers, and senior leaders of organizations globally. We focus on uncovering and transforming hidden factors that enhance competitiveness and innovation, operational excellence, and values-based leadership. We help firms build sustainable capacity, processes, and routines for leaders at all levels – so they can produce and scale value-based operational excellence and create innovative solutions to problems.
Our Team
William Isaacs, CEO
Skip Griffin, Sr. Director
Isaacs is the Founder and President of dialogos, a transformational consulting and strategic leadership development firm based in Concord, MA, and founder of Generative Capital, a strategic and human capital advisor for Venture Capital and Private Equity firms. He taught for nearly three decades as a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he co-founded the Organizational Learning Center at MIT with Peter Senge.
Isaacs wrote Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, which has been translated into many languages, and was featured in Fast Company as a guide to “the secret of good informal conversation.” It has been acclaimed by a variety of reviewers as the definitive guide to profound change through speaking and listening. It is also frequently cited and used as a central guide to the practice of dialogue in settings around the world. For the past 25 years Dr. Isaacs has advised CEO’s, Prime Ministers and senior leaders in corporations, development organizations and governments on how to produce transformative results in their teams and systems. His focus is on raising the quality of dialogue, reducing polarization and cross boundary conflict, and producing large scale transformative change—in contexts ranging from union-management conflicts, safety breakdowns in high hazard industries, strategic and culture change in global multinationals, enterprise software implementation, and national and regional strategy development.
Isaacs has taught dialogue, the principles of identity—based leadership, and generative change to thousands of corporate executives, development professionals, and national and policy leaders around the world. His work is featured in the curriculum of many programs and courses on dialogue around the world. Dr. Isaacs received an A.B. in policy studies from Dartmouth College, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.Phil. and D.Phil from Oxford University.
Skip Griffin has significant experience in social organizing and leading in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, giving him a unique understanding of the interface between individual leaders, the teams and organizations they lead, and the customers and communities or networks that are impacted by their activities. Skip specializes in transformational coaching for senior leaders, helping them to understand the ways multiple parts of their life (mental, spiritual, physical, emotional, etc.) affect job performance and satisfaction, develop effective strategies for issue resolution, team building, and real systems change. He has served as the director of Community Relations and Public Affairs at the Boston Globe, as the director of the African-American Institute at Northeastern University and as member of the Federal Receivership Team South Boston High School (MA).
Skip uses a variety of evaluation tools and coaching protocols developed by dialogos, blended with his own insights from growing up in the US Civil Rights Movement, coaching high-level amateur basketball and various executive positions, to assess leadership capabilities and design developmental or transformational strategies for individuals and teams. Graduate schoolwork included studying with Chris Argyris, Carol Gilligan and Chester M. Pierce.
Skip has extensive experience with USFS Region 8 Leadership, including facilitating RLT gatherings and individual team coaching. Recent clients include the International Finance Corporation; the Kellogg Foundation; Royal Bank of Scotland; ROCA, The Maine Educators Alliance; the Bedford, NY school system; Consortium of Five School Systems in State of Florida, and the Consortium of School Systems in Westchester County, New York. Skip holds a B.A. in Government from Harvard College and a Masters of Education in Organizational and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Ann Ralston
Didem Tekay
The fundamental motivation for creating my company, over 20 years ago, was to work with organizations to create a place where good people could invest their passion. Where they were inspired to do their best work. To create in and with others, the value that customers long for. Like the human system, I believe organizations have a heart, a brain, and a nervous system… a soul. They thrive, they can wither, and they can die. We have witnessed and played a small part in amazing successes. We have seen some of those very same successes reversed or diminished by change in leadership, inadequate systems, the whim of 'the street', or a sale, merger, or acquisition… or a black swan. While the human system is a good metaphor for an organization, all businesses at the core are people. Leaders, employees, customers, and stakeholders. So to truly create organizations that thrive, the human systems and the cohesiveness of the organization and teams need to be designed, nurtured and aligned with those harder systems - strategy, cash and execution - to create sustainable results or impact.
Over the years, I have learned and integrated many coaching methodologies, assessments, and tools, Scaling Up, Exponential Organizations, Metronomics, Multipliers, Agile, Jobs To Be Done, in the name of growth and success of a company, leadership or innovation. Still the most meaningful changes happen when a group of people come together to decide the direction, the values, the culture, and the place called, 'where I work.'
Founder Grow Forward Consulting, Senior Partner MCT Consulting, Author ‘The Grow Forward Manifesto’ Book
Didem Tekay describes herself as a Grow Architect, she has been working with most admired global companies to coach culture and leadership transformation journeys. She is a pioneer on curating participatory coaching interventions to inspire executive leaders and leadership teams in their crucial conversations. Her book, ‘The Grow-Forward Manifesto, navigates leaders and leadership teams on how to foster personal and professional growth through co-creating a Grow Forward Pathway with relational practice. She has recently nominated for the Thinkers50 Marshall Goldsmith Distinguished Achievement Award for Coaching and Mentoring. She has been listed in the ‘Forbes Global Forty Over 40 Women to Watch’ list on diversity field. She is one of the 200 female mentees in the Women on Boards Program, the initiative launched to expand the women in business “ready” to lean in and increase female representation on boards. She is the founder of Grow Women Circle, a space where women leaders encouraged to voice their visions, step up, grow forward and lead through coaching. Currently, she is contributing to ‘Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors’ book by Drs Jonathan Passmore, Marshall Goldsmith and Brian Underhill with ‘Grow Forward Pathway’ chapter.
My creative focus is on Sustainability and Leadership, I’m curious how leaders in private sector can succeed with purpose in relation with Sustainability. Companies should integrate Sustainability into their business model and therefore their strategies, governance tools, performance evaluation systems, processes, customers, and business partner relations. This sustainability focused major transformation requires profound both personal and cultural change. Leaders need to lead in line with principles of Sustainability, understand whole system approach and transdisciplinary perspective. This transition to Sustainable Leadership needs knowledge and capability building with a transformation process. I’m working on creation of interventions on leadership team level to foster Sustainable Leadership.
Rick Maguire
Rick is a Director of dialogos | Generative Capital and has thirty-five years' experience leading and developing high-performance teams as a nuclear submarine officer, corporate executive, and strategic business advisor and coach. His coaching clients include leadership in companies that have successfully grown from early-stage venture investment to strategic acquisition and public offering.
In his role as practice leader, strategic growth advisor and leadership coach at Generative Capital, Rick helps executives and entrepreneurs strategically scale their leadership to realize their aspirations for positive impact in the world.
He is best known for his ability to turn theory into practice in challenging, dynamic environments that brings out the potential of leaders and teams to achieve audacious goals and experience greater fulfillment in their work and personal lives.
Rick’s operating experience includes incubating and launching new businesses, products, information services, manufacturing, and delivery systems as a Microsoft executive and senior contributor at Hewlett Packard, and Varian Associates. He has led numerous innovative R&D initiatives including manufacturing technology that scaled production of advanced night vision devices, DARPA sponsored independent R&D for submarine communications, R&D process improvements at HP, and accelerating customer growth in Microsoft’s move into enterprise computing.
He holds a Masters in Engineering Management from Stanford, a BSME from Lehigh University and is a graduate of the Wharton Executive Leadership Program. Rick holds coaching certifications from The Hudson Institute, Scaling Up, and Leadership Circle, and serves as the Board Chair of the LeadsMinds Africa Foundation.
Rick lives with his family, wife and the younger three of his seven children on Bainbridge Island, WA and enjoys gardening, cooking, time in his woodshop and getting outside in the Pacific Northwest on a bike, kayak or on foot.
Art Kleiner
I'm a writer, educator, and editor with a longstanding interest in the underlying patterns that affect surface behavior. As a consulting editor, I've worked with a number of people to put together books on management and other subjects, including Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline Fieldbook series, Peter Schwartz' book The Art of the Long View (on scenario practice), Jon Katzenbach's Critical Few (on culture) and Cheri Lovre's book A Little Book of Courage for the Big Pandemic. In writing about management I've tried to bring journalistic craft together with a feel for the effect that practices have on real behavior, and also to defend the imp in the shadows along with the aspiring visionary in the sun. I've written many articles on management thinkers and three well-regarded books: The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers who Reinvented Corporate Management (Warren Bennis Books, 2008); Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (Random House, 2003); and (with cognitive psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz and executive coach Josie Thomson) The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership (Columbia University Press, 2019). I am a partner in Wise Advocate Enterprises, which has a coaching and leadership development approach based on neuroscience and executive function; and a principal in Kleiner Powell International (KPI), with Juliette Powell, where our business is content strategy. I was an editor at the Whole Earth Catalog, where I helped found the WELL computer network and edited much early material on personal computers; and I'm currently a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches group. In working with Dialogos and GenCap I feel like I'm bringing all this, and more, together, and learning a great deal. I live in Connecticut with my wife Faith and two of my three daughters.
Dr. Alper Tenguez
Cees Kramer
is a German-Turkish national who grew up in Frankfurt, Germany and lives in Istanbul, Turkey. He studied Industrial Engineering in the United States and completed a PhD in development economics at Goethe University, Frankfurt. As an Engagement Manager with McKinsey he led client engagements in the private as well as the public sector in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Integrating his academic and consulting experience Alper advised extensively in the health care sector (insurance, hospitals, pharma) and institutions like the German GIZ, government of Albania on FDI or the GCC on financial market integration.
It is during this time that Alper discovered his passion and talent to support executives achieve their ambitions with their teams. He now works as an executive coach and organizational consultant. His focus has shifted from "smart consulting answers" to enabling individuals and groups, strengthening their leadership capabilities and thereby have them solve their own challenges. He has coached and consulted executives from the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia.
Alper is passionate about education and is an engaged teacher of the future generation. As a lecturer and program designer at the University of Frankfurt, Goethe Business School and a Turkish Master in Leadership in Organizations he drives the creation of innovative executive education programs. His years of international work have convinced Alper that organizations must innovate new models of developing and engaging their employees in order to be global, profitable and socially responsible entities.
is a Senior Consultant at Dialogos and former senior executive at BP where he worked for 29 years. Cees has extensive work experience in Africa and Asia, integrating diverse organisations and individuals in complex environments, and enabling local teams to take on leadership. As General Manager Integrated Supply and Trading in South Africa, Cees oversaw operations in 11 African countries (including South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana) with a turnover of USD 1.5 billion, and successfully established a local leadership team through dedicated talent development efforts in an environment that was heavily dependent on international experts and managers. As a leader who established the first BP joint venture in China and who managed organisational and cultural post-merger integration processes in Europe, Asia, and the US, Cees is highly skilled at creating alliances and win-win situations, and at integrating people from diverse cultures and backgrounds. He has facilitated transformation projects within global corporation, energy start ups and the World Bank. Cees holds a master’s degree in business administration from Rotterdam University. He is fluent in English and Dutch and has good working knowledge of German and French.