Colleagues

Projects often require bringing together a network of colleagues. Below are some people who are colleagues in projects done over the past three years.

Verna Allee – President, Value Networks LLC

Value Networks LLC is the leading provider of value network visualization and analysis applications. Customers include Cisco, Boeing, SAP, Rolls Royce Marine Engine, Knoll, Kimberly-Clark, AgResearch, Mayo Clinic, Environment Canada, VINNOVA, BCAHC, and iScale.

Ms. Allee is a pioneer in value networks, intangibles, knowledge management, and new business models. She is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, advisor to the European Commission, and was a member of the Brookings Institution Task Force on Intangibles in the late 1990s. She is on a number of Advisory and Editorial Boards including Hazel Henderson’s Ethical Markets television series. Ms. Allee has been a visiting lecturer at universities around the world and holds degrees from UC Berkeley and JFK University. She is author of numerous articles and books, including The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks (2003)

Jem Bendell – Director, Lifeworth

Since the mid-1990s, Jem has been involved in, advised on and written about global social change, focusing on the relationship of corporations to sustainable development. He has been involved in the creation of innovative institutions such as the Marine Stewardship Council in 1996, co-wrote the first book on cross-sectoral partnerships for sustainable development in 1997, has written over 40 other publications including a column in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, and four UN reports on related topics.

As director of Lifeworth, He has been working with over 30 organisations in 14 countries, seeking to promote the systemic transformation of markets.

Jem is an Adjunct Associate Professor with Griffith University School of Busienss (Australia), and Visiting Fellow with the UN Research Institute for Social Development.

Paul Gray – Associate Professor, Boston College

Paul has served at Boston College for 35 years. As well as Associate Professor of Sociology, he is Faculty Chair of Leadership for Change, an executive management program. As a teacher and business consultant, he focuses on corporate citizenship, leadership development, and business and social change. He also received major federal support for a project on worker education, and has served as Senior Faculty at the Center for Corporate Citizenship. His consulting clients have included the City of Boston, the National Alliance for Business, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Shell Chemical, Motorola Communications, BP, and Sapient Corporation. Paul’s most recent book, The Research Imagination: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Methods was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Minu Hemmati – Independent Advisor

Dr. Minu Hemmati, Independent Advisor, is a clinical psychologist with a doctorate in organisational and environmental psychology, and has been working with international organisations, governments, non-government organizations, corporations, women’s networks, and research institutions for over a decade.

Minu is focusing on two areas: firstly, multi-stakeholder change processes where her work includes designing and facilitating dialogue and partnerships among stakeholders; social inclusion and conflict resolution; leadership development and training in dialogue and change processes; research and advocacy on political participation; and corporate stakeholder engagement. Secondly, she does research and advocacy on gender and sustainable development issues, with a recent focus on climate change, having co-founded the international network GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice. Minu has wide experience with international policy making on sustainable development and related issues as well as implementation and evaluation in the field, particularly in Africa. More information atwww.minuhemmati.net.

Sanjeev Khagram – Senior Steward, iScale

Dr. Khagram is known worldwide for his interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral leadership, research, teaching and engagement in the areas of globalization and transnationalism, sustainable development, human security, good governance, public policy, partnerships, social networks, corporate social responsibility, civil society, strategic management, impact assessment. He is currently a Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Ratan Tata Chair at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Lead Steward of iScale. He is on leave from the University of Washington where for the past three years he was a faculty member in Public Affairs and International Studies, and Director of the Lindenberg Center.

He was previously Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre and led the global impact evaluation and learning program at the World Commission On Dams. He has published widely including: Restructuring World Politics, with University of Minnesota Press; Dams and Development, with Cornell University Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance: A Transnational Perspective/ Prospective" in the journal Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, and "Social Balance Sheets" in Harvard Business Review – Latin America. Khagram has worked extensively with global action networks, multilateral agencies, governments, corporations, civil society organizations, professional associations and universities all over the world, with extended periods in Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand, Germany and the United Kingdom. He holds a B.A. in development studies/engineering, an M.A. in economics (from the Food Research Institute), and a Ph.D. in political science, all from Stanford University.

Bettye Pruitt – D3 Associates

Bettye Pruitt is a social historian (PhD Boston University) dedicated to supporting collective learning and action. Since 2003, she has been a coordinator of the Generative Change Community (see www.gc-community.net and Pruitt, "The Generative Change Community," Reflections: the SoL Journal 8:2 [2007]). From 2000-2004, Bettye supported the UNDP Democratic Dialogue Project and is co-author of Democratic Dialogue-A Handbook for Practitioners (UNDP, the Organization of American States, International IDEA, Handbook for Practitioners (UNDP, the Organization of American States, International IDEA, and the Canadian International Development Agency: 2007). She is a member and former co-chair of the council of trustees of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning). Previously, she had a long career as a consulting historian specializing in historical analysis of institutional issues and development.

Jim Ritchie-Dunham – President, Institute for Strategic Clarity

Jim is a life-long student of the agreements that guide human interaction. He explores this study through consulting, research, and teaching. Jim’s work has focused primarily on understanding human agreements as systems, developing strategy from a systems-resource perspective, and fostering large-scale social-change as a collaborative, holistic inquiry. He has developed conceptual frameworks in his work with executive teams in corporate, government, civil society, inter-sectoral, and global-action-network settings for twenty years in seventeen countries.

Jim is president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity, and an adjunct faculty member at Monterrey TEC and Harvard. He co-authored Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources, and has written many articles on systemic strategy for academic and practitioner journals.  Previously he was a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a professor of operations research and decision sciences at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), an advisor to the Mexican Secretary of Health, and a petroleum engineer at Conoco.

William M. Snyder – Principal, World Design

William M. Snyder writes and consults to help leaders organize action-learning networks that serve the common good. He has consulted for 25 years on large-scale change efforts in the private, public, and non-profit sectors with organizations such as AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Daimler-Chrysler, McKinsey & Company, the Veterans Administration, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the National Cancer Institute. Bill is a global thought-leader on the topic of “communities of practice” – groups that facilitate learning, innovation, and collaborative action among practitioners with a shared passion. His research and consulting work focuses on civic communities of practice at local, national, and global levels (see worlddesign.org).

Selected co-authored publications: "Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier" (Harvard Business Review, 2000); Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002); “Communities of Practice: A New Tool for Managers,” (also in Collaboration: Using Networks and Partnerships, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003); “Our World as a Learning System,” (in Create a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice, and Technology, Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Philip Thomas – Founder/Principal, D3 Associates

Philip Thomas has over 20 years experience working as a consultant, trainer, and educator in the fields of peace building, conflict transformation, and public dialogue and deliberation. He has worked extensively in Latin America in the design and implementation of intersectoral dialogue processes bringing Government, Private Sector and Civil Society groups together to work on issues as varied as land, labor, inter-ethnic relations and reparations. He also worked with the different National Peace Commissions established by the Guatemalan Peace Accords in 1996. Philip is co-author of Democratic Dialogue-A Handbook for Practitioners (UNDP, the Organization of American States, International IDEA, and the Canadian International Development Agency: 2007). He serves as Co-Coordinator of the Generative Change Community. He has done graduate work in theology, holds Masters degrees in both Administration and Organizational Development, and is a doctoral candidate in Human and Organizational Systems at the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA and teaches courses at Goshen College, a Mennonite college in Goshen Indiana.