Taking Care ™
of People and Business
Our Story
Dr. Kelly Gesmundo Clarke
Founder, President and Engagement Lead
Dr. Clarke has held senior leadership positions tackling tenacious and complex problems over two decades. She has led in large matrixed environments and served as the Founding Executive Director for a social impact start up with an annual budget of $50,000 which she leveraged to secure $25 million in capital resulting in $96 million of impact. She has been recognized at the statewide and national level for her work leading in adversity contexts. She brought together a broad range of stakeholders to create visions, strategies and plans around new ways of approaching some of Michigan's most challenging problems during the Great Recession. Under her executive leadership these visions were successfully brought to fruition transforming blighted spaces into vibrant community places. Prior to that she served as a senior leader in Chicago supporting the management of $300 million annually, redefining service delivery resulting in securing $100 million in private financing and winning a national award for a public/private initiative. She later served clients in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan via her boutique consulting practice.
The combination of working both as a senior leader and a consultant throughout her career caused her to be curious about how leaders could be best supported to lead effectively during adversity or disruption. This curiosity led Kelly to pursue a doctorate degree in Organization Development where her dissertation research looked at enablers and inhibitors for exemplary leadership during COVID19.
Her original research and interviews across industries from manufacturing to healthcare to professional and financial services yielded a theory of exemplary leadership as a systems level concept defined by Taking Care of both people and business concerns with equal focus and energy.
Her work underscored the importance of exemplary systems defined by this orientation of Taking Care to support and enable exemplary leaders' success.
Along the way she worked with many talented leaders, consultants and scholar/practitioners who were warm, adaptable and extremely capable. These amazing humans form the team that delivers the work to clients.
The Exemplary Leadership Institue offers coaching, facilitation, leadership training, strategic guidance and co-creation of culture and exemplary leadership frameworks. Dr. Clarke has crafted customizable solutions based on her research so that clients experience support that is evidence based to forward their exemplary leadership, culture and performance goals.
As someone that spent many years as a senior leader tackling challenges in significantly uncertain and disrupted environments, Dr. Clarke understands that while research-based theory and practice is important a pragmatic approach that can be adapted to meet each client's context is also key in order to be responsive to budget and time constraints.
Dr. David Jamieson
Expert Advisor and Master Coach
Dr. Jamieson is President, of Jamieson Consulting Group, Inc. (providing consultation, leader and change agent coaching & speaking), and a retired Professor, of Organization Development & Change from the University of St. Thomas. He is also an active Distinguished Visiting Scholar in 3 other graduate OD programs (Bowling Green, Benedictine, Cabrini).
He has over 55 years of experience consulting with organizations on leadership, change, strategy, design, and human resource issues ranging from large corporations and smaller organizations, non-profits, and professional associations, cutting across most industries and sectors, and working with senior level executives, contributors from all levels and departments, and frontline people.
For 40 years, he has taught hundreds of people interested in organization change, leadership, and design (including the schools above and at USC, UCLA, and American).
He has served as President of NTL, a Past National President of the American Society for Training and Development (now ATD), and Past Chair of the Management Consultation Division and Practice Theme Committee of the Academy of Management (AOM).
He has been honored with The Lifetime Achievement Award, Sharing OD Knowledge Award, and Service to the OD Network Award from the Organization Development Network (ODN), the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Career Achievement Award and Distinguished OD Educator Award from the Academy of Management; and a past-Chair of the Organization Development Education Association.
He received his Ph.D. in Management from UCLA, majoring in Organization Design & Development, and a BS in Business Administration from Drexel University, with a Behavioral Science minor.
Dave is the co-author of 8 books, 17 chapters, and dozens of articles in journals and newsletters. He has published with leading publishers (e.g., Jossey-Bass, Palgrave MacMillan, AMACOM, Information Age Publishing, Pfieffer, and Sage) on organization development and change, consultation, facilitation, Use of Self in professional roles, integrating scholarship and practice, and strategic HR.
He is the current Editor of Organization Development Review and Assoc. Editor, Journal of Management Inquiry, and serves on the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Editorial Review Board.
Our Team
Our team includes Scholar/Practioners that have broad leadership and industry experience as well as research backgrounds and strong credentials.
We know your time, your team's time and your budget are precious resources. Your custom solution is grounded by guides who bring real world leadership experience, use evidenced based approaches and co-create your custom approach with your input and insights.
Our Primary Driver. Our team members are guided by a purpose of crafting solutions that will yield outcomes that are meaningful to you and change that will be sustainable.
Our Qualifications
Our team of Engagement Lead and Advisors hold doctoral degrees in Organization Development, Organization Design and Organization Behavior.
Our Senior Consultants hold advanced degrees in business and organization design and have strong consulting experience.
Our team members are scholar practitioners who have spent their careers both as leaders in industry, as consultants and in research and scholarship.
Founder and Engagement Lead, Dr. Clarke holds an undergraduate degree in Social and Management Studies, a Master of Science in Sociology from the London School of Economics, and a doctorate in Organization Development and Change from the Schmidthorst College of Business, Bowling Green State University. Dr. Clarke is a certified Executive coach, having undertaken her training via the College for Executive Coaching a postgraduate, ICF accredited program. She is recognized as a Distinguished Leader by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and has completed a variety of executive education courses on leadership topics at Harvard's Kennedy school of Government, Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.
Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson -
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