I started my journey in the 1990s as an owner of a “Psychology for Businesses” coaching, training and consulting company.
After completing my Ph.D. in Psychology, I joined the IPM Business School — one of the leading executive education and consulting institutions in Eastern Europe. Over the years, I worked as a corporate client program director, a chair of a program in leadership and management, a senior consultant, and then Executive MBA Director. I coached people and groups, consulted, and developed programs for adult learners and executives. My Ph.D. in Strategy from Lancaster University (UK) led me to apply strategic approaches to my consulting and all my work.
While, during the first part of my professional life, I worked with executive and corporate clientele, I met a new group of clients – Millennials and veterans – when I became a professor in the United States in the early 2000s. I found that both of these groups face “What’s next?” challenges and that they also have multidimensional profiles.
Bringing together these two lines of my clients —the executives and those who are at the “What’s next” stage of life, I was able to collected a rich cache of data on each’s needs and expectations of the other.
Challenging old notions of “getting in on the ground floor and working your way up,” I drew on this store of data to develop a framework of “boutique/built-in employability” that applies the psychology of choices, the strategy of stakeholder relationships, and pragmatism of design thinking, and named it the BE-EDGE method.
My research on social capital in a low-trust context received the prestigious Academy of Management “Best Paper” recognition within the Entrepreneurship Division. My research on developing donor commitment in a high-trust but competitive environment received the Carolyn Dexter Award in the Academy of Management and the “Best Paper” award of the Nonprofit Management Division. My cases have been published in the prestigious Case Research Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, SAGE and Emerald Publishing Group business case collections, listed in Harvard Business Publishing and awarded in a number of global case writing competitions.
Please find the list of other awards and recognitions below.
