Colleagues
Marianne Erdelyi
Consultant to senior teams and trainer of influencing skills
Marianne is a treasure. After more than 35 years of friendship we can still talk for hours about a new model for explaining how the world—and the people in it—might get even better.
Marianne brought me into my first diversity work: race and sex desegregation work in the public schools of Ohio. We learned a lot about dealing with resistance. And sometimes what we did really worked. One time it worked so well that we danced round the room after the participants left. I imagine we are still the only two people to have ever danced for sheer joy in the boardroom of the Cleveland Public Schools.
Marianne is still working in Cleveland—and around the US. And she occasionally comes over to Europe. She is beyond description, but you can start here to find out more about Marianne Erdelyi .
George Simons
Consultant on multiculturalism and virtual working
George once wrote a book asking "How Big Is A Person? and George is the biggest person I know: big heart, big laugh, big brain, and big belief in the possiblity that all of us can share our differences and live together in peace and delight.
George is the inventor of the Diversophy™ game about culture, which you can now even play on a mobile phone. Click here to learn more about George Simons and Diversophy
George is a great partner. He and I have trained courses together and we created the workbooks for the award-winning Video Arts video: Not My Type: Valuing Diversity. You can get the Not My Type video from Video Arts or local distributors.
Heidrun Saß-Schreiber
Consultant to senior teams and specialist in action learning
Heidrun is passionate. She is passionate about life, about her work, about her family and friends, about her culture, and about the possibility of our learning to listen to each other as a world full of wonderful people.
We have worked together for more than six years and are now beginning our fourth two-year program with a group of young managers that we support and challenge as they learn how to be even more effective than they imagined they could be.
Heidrun and I are so different that anyone hiring us gets almost the full range of learning possibilites. And so do we!
Den Winterburn
Consultant on teambuilding and personal development
As lead consultant of Imagine Consultants, Den works with people in industry, government, and schools to build teams of senior executives and to facilitate personal development of staff, students, and employees. He combines a deep commitment to measurable results with a delight in the power of music and fun to transform people.
Den and I work together as ImagineCastle, combining our skills to work with teams of senior executives—sometimes in an industrial research lab and sometimes with Liverpool head teachers. Den is a delight to work with: he challenges participants (and me) to do the best we can and then imagine even more. And after a hard day's work, he can pull us all together with his guitar or with his humour.
News Archive
Years ago I realised that there are no successful "independent" consultants. The secret is to be an interdependent consultant. The colleagues described here are the people who support and challenge me as we work together.
Sometimes we work in the same place at the same time; sometimes we just know that the other is there in spirit. As Robert Frost says in "The Tuft of Flowers":
"Men work together," I told him from the heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."