CLIFFORD S. SAUNDERS, PH.D.

Dr. Cliff Saunders is an Expert Management Consulting Professional and a Master Facilitator, Trainer and Speaker. He specializes in the really hard stuff that other Professionals shun. Like maximizing profitability by accelerating product to market velocity, anticipating and planning for unpredictable futures, implementing dramatic cost reductions through product and process redesigns, or making significant progress on any mind-numbing organizational issue. This has placed Cliff Saunders in the top 1% of his profession.

With an educational background that spans Engineering (1st Class Honours - he has two patents), Applied Psychology (MSc), and Systems Theories of all types (PhD Cybernetics), together with extensive research, high tech and manufacturing experience, his life's career has focused on helping organizations manage change, problem solve, make better decisions, improve performance and effectiveness, expand leadership skills, enhance group dynamics, re-engineer processes, and turn chaos and complexity to advantage in the market place.

His main field of expertise has been in the collaborative design and implementation of strategies that build and retain strong teams, transform cultures, and integrate departmental roles and responsibilities to realize the company's strategic vision.

Cliff is fortunate to have worked in both the corporate world and the private consulting environment, which has provided him with the rare opportunity to close the gap between theory and practice, between understanding what makes or breaks the success of any endeavor that involves group processes and actually living it in the trenches. Examples of his work are outlined in Key Achievements below.

A good portion of Cliff's career has been devoted to the use of empirical methods for illuminating meaning in the fields of organizational design and behavior. Of particular relevance to today's economic reality is his familiarity with Organizational Agility (or the ability of an organization to track and deal with novel threats) and Business Process Re-engineering in response to the widespread demand for guidance and expertise in the design and implementation of process improvements in the last decade.

Cliff's practical knowledge of systems, social psychology, commerce and public policy is broad and, in some areas, deep. He has had the opportunity to develop and implement a multitude of ideas and innovative concepts on Organizational Effectiveness, Change Management, Scenario Planning, Operational and Strategic Planning, Cost Reduction, Risk Management, and New Product Introduction.

He has designed and facilitated hundreds of successful executive and team workshops with Fortune 500 Corporations and also played an influential role in the development of Federal, State and Provincial policies.

In addition to his work in face-to-face consulting with colleagues and clients, Cliff has designed and delivered a broad range of training programs, lectures and speaking engagements aimed at developing organizational capabilities by enhancing individual effectiveness.

He also designed, built and used a variety of Problem Solving Methodologies for gaining consensus, including his own proprietary Group Decision Support Software, with which he has trained Big Six Consulting Firms like KPMG, Ernst & Young and Arthur Andersen to extend the range and adaptability of their service offering to their own clients.

On a personal note, Cliff is originally from England, and he holds an EEC passport, which entitles him to work in the UK and Europe. He has lived on all five continents for extended periods of time (4 years in Singapore and Hong Kong, 4 years in Saudi Arabia, etc.) and he has a passable command of French and Arabic. His understanding and appreciation of foreign cultures is broad and diversified.

Key Achievements:

Dr. Clifford Saunders has facilitated hundreds of executive workshops during his career. Following is a modest sample of his work:

• Designed and facilitated the use of technology for a 500-person Interloquium in Mexico to help plan the development of the state over the next 20 years.
• Designed and facilitated a session of 125 senior individuals representing 16 different stakeholder groups (with the help of seven facilitators he had trained) - a two-day Visioning exercise for The Corpus Christi Bay National Estuary Program under the auspices of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Designed and facilitated the use of group decision support technology for the Chief Executive Officers Summit where 400 CIOs gathered to learn about and discuss the latest issues around information technology.
• Designed and facilitated for Industry Canada and Human Resources Development Canada an in-depth 10-participant two-day session dealing with Information Technology and the Public Schools' curriculum for the next ten years.
• Put 100 Senior Managers through an intensive two-day, fast-track Scenario Planning exercise which explored likely scenarios for the evolution of the client’s main market. As well as identifying and developing the scenarios, the Managers produced contingency "could care less" responses, the environmental monitoring system and the human resource training needed to meet the coming challenge.
• Hired by the British Broadcasting Company to use own proprietary modeling technology with seven young people to explore the issue of the British Revised National Curriculum. The program was broadcasted in Prime Time. (Video available)
• Developed with 20 Senior VPs of a major Canadian Telecommunications Company a multidisciplinary group which dealt with international investment plans for the next ten years. The extended project used the internet to run an extensive Delphi on likely important and risky trends in the marketplace, and was followed by a number of intensive workshops which involved the use of our modeling tools to build and explore plausible worlds that might significantly affect international investment decisions.
• Trained senior managers, designed and used in real time applications effective methods to "break the steel makers’ mold" for a major client. This involved a number of workshops with senior executives which focused on questions such as "What are the unquestioned assumptions we have about steel making?" and "What would REALLY frighten us?" These workshops led to a number of cost cutting projects and the initiation of new market developments.
• Facilitated an extended series of sessions with a major Canadian brewery starting with an environmental scan and company repositioning exercise, followed by war gaming to test assumptions about likely competitor responses, and ending with an extensive brand management exercise where new products were launched and old ones relaunched.
• Developed a complete "end-to-end" strategic operating plan, which dealt with long-term strategic uncertainties as well as operational activities to support the long term, and monitored its implementation, for a major point-of-sale equipment manufacturer and service supplier.
• Retained by a major Australian brewery to develop with the executive team a system wide strategic and operating plan for the next five years.
• Helped a major American hand tool manufacturer to anticipate plausible future scenarios and develop a comprehensive employee skills program to support the expected growth.
• Worked with customers and a new product development team of a major US based telecommunications manufacturer to identify, prioritize and roll out new feature enhancements for a main line of business.
• Quickly helped a small ailing telecommunications company to get out of an unprofitable aging product line and into a much more satisfactory niche.
• Designed methods for a major Canadian Bank to improve the coupling of its learning center to the day-to-day business.
• Helped a provincial education board rethink its vision in the light of reduced budgets and designed an extensive resource allocation exercise to support the new vision.
• Worked with the Carter Foundation’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Georgia’s Urban and Rural Regional Development plans.
• Assisted a Canadian Trust Company to identify and evaluate new financial products and later set up a new product idea system for the whole company.
• Spent three years continuously supporting a multibillion dollar manufacturer in business cost management. This support consisted of training the cost management team in effective team cost reduction methods, and taking the lead in running cost reduction workshops. The organization was recently awarded the title of ‘Best in the World" by Andersen Consulting. The results of Dr. Saunders’ intervention are measured in the hundreds of millions annually.
• Helped a City Planning Team rapidly and successfully work through the issues resulting from an enacted metropolitan merger.
• Works regularly with various Internet start-ups in their ‘Quarterly Annual’ planning meetings. These sessions focus on the short-term turbulent surprises that seem to appear from nowhere, need immediate attention, yet have the very potent danger of disrupting the principle focus of the organization.
• Has developed and regularly holds e-boot camps for organizations of all sizes to help them figure out their short and medium-term Internet, Web, EDI and related IT directions with an emphasis on complementing core business strategies.
• Helped a large multinational streamline and implement its cost reporting data from an annual reporting mode to bi-monthly.
• Helped a growing US Bank refine and strengthen its approach to new financial product risk management. A by-product of this initiative was a massive reduction in political ‘churn’ that turned out to be a result of how new product risk had been handled in the past.
• Using the fast track Time to Market methodology, helped a newly assembled group of senior managers scope, prototype, refine and implement a completely radical approach to Customer Care for their multinational client base.
• Worked with a North American organization to operationalize and streamline their contract manufacturing interfaces.
• Helped members of the American Public Power Association use scenario planning as a component of their Strategic Planning initiatives in the light of deregulation legislation.
• Helped an ailing, second-tier PBX supplier to successfully refocus its new product development activities and discard wasteful and irrelevant marginal projects.
• Held a number of electronic commerce boot camps, designed over two days to take a client organization through the prevailing fundamentals of electronic commerce, the Web and the Internet, helping them see what is and will be possible in an online world, and designing a strategy and implementation plan to take advantage of that world without falling into a mire of hype.
• Held a two-day session for a large number of senior cost managers from around the world with a $25 Billion multinational manufacturer. The brief was to consolidate the managers into one team by setting aside once and for all the petty bickering and backbiting that had impeded their ability to provide the President with timely, accurate and detailed product cost data.

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