Thought Partners to Leaders

Each of TruePoint’s senior advisors brings several decades of exceptional experience and accomplishments in line management, academia, and consulting.

We have held senior leadership positions at industry leaders such as GE. We’ve taught at academic institutions such as Harvard Business School and Cornell University. And we bring decades of consulting experience from our work at firms such as McKinsey & Co. and TruePoint’s predecessor organization, The Center for Organizational Fitness.

TruePoint’s team consulting model allows our clients to access this exceptionally broad and deep experience base and expertise on strategy, organization, leadership, and change. (See How We Work for more details on the TruePoint consulting model).

Partner Group

Michael Beer Mike’s 40-year career, beginning at Corning in the 1960s, has been dedicated to understanding and improving the way businesses enhance performance while building capability and commitment. He is renowned and honored in several business disciplines — including management, organizational design, strategic human resources, organizational psychology and organizational development. Mike is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard Business School and award-winning author or co-author of nine books, including (with Russell Eisenstat) The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal.

Russell Eisenstat For nearly three decades Russ has partnered with senior leaders to achieve breakthroughs in large-scale organizational change and innovation, strategy implementation, and the design of complex organizations. A former Harvard Business School Professor and for five years Senior Organizational Fellow at McKinsey & Co., Russ has written extensively for Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and other publications. He is the co-author (with Michael Beer) of the award-winning book The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal.

Nathaniel Foote For more than 25 years Nathaniel has focused on the linkage between strategy and organization in creating high-performing enterprises — how adaptive, iterative approaches to strategy, organization design, and knowledge management help complex businesses perform amidst rapid change. Prior to TruePoint, Nathaniel spent 19 years with McKinsey & Co. in roles that included leading McKinsey’s Organization Design practice, Director of Knowledge and Practice Development, and leading the European Organization practice.

Björn Frössevi Björn brings more than 15 years of experience in helping organizations improve performance. Prior to joining TruePoint, Björn served as the CEO for two of Sweden’s leading management consulting firms, and managed business development for a $700 million logistics company as well as for top IT and real estate firms. Björn has facilitated mergers and reorganized product and sales units for a variety of telecommunications, IT, real estate and logistics companies. Björn is the co-author of the 1995 book Core Competence – the Key to Future Competitiveness and served as the editor of Strategy and Leadership – a handbook for managers – from 1998-2004. He participates in an executive Ph.D. program at Chalmers School of Technology and holds an MSc from Stockholm School of Economics. Björn also studied and lectured for one year at the University of Wisconsin.

Flemming Norrgren Flemming has spent nearly three decades developing management skills, building industrial R&D functions, and coordinating large international R&D projects in pharmaceuticals, technology, and other knowledge-intensive industries. During the 1980s he spearheaded a number of large change projects within the manufacturing industry that encompassed the redesign of factories, work organizations, and logistics. As a researcher, Flemming is founder and associate director of the Fenix Executive Ph.D. program and research center. He has led more than 30 different management research projects – in change management, industrial R&D management, project management, leadership and socio-technical systems design – for leading companies such as AstraZeneca, Ericsson, TELIA and Volvo. He received his Ph.D. in psychology at Göteborg University in 1982, where he later served as associate professor.

Consultants

Niclas Adler Blending academic and management expertise, Niclas has spent more than 15 years as a strategic advisor to science and technology-based organizations ranging from startup companies to research centers to large multinational firms. He has co-founded 12 companies and currently serves as a board member for nine startups. He is an associate professor at Stockholm School of Economics, Judge Business School, Cambridge University, Ecoles des Mines de Paris, and the Sunningdale Institute in the UK. Niclas is a founder and director for multiple research centers and has been a strategic advisor to multinational companies like Ericsson, Volvo, AstraZeneca, ABB, TeliaSonera, NovoNordisk and UCB Pharmaceuticals.

Steven Dichter For more than 25 years Steve has focused on improving the performance of large, complex institutions. Most recently New Mexico’s Deputy Cabinet Secretary for Taxation and Revenue, Steve previously was President and COO of M2 Automotive and a Managing Director of Security Capital Group, and he spent 20 years at McKinsey & Co. Steve, who led McKinsey’s Change Center, co-authored the BusinessWeek Bestseller Real Change Leaders (Random House, 1996) and speaks frequently on organization performance and change.

Maria Elmquist Maria is a consultant with Truepoint Partners since 2005 and a researcher with the Truepoint Research Centre. She has extensive experience from both consulting and research on strategic change and innovation management, mainly in the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors. She is on the faculty of the Department of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, and a senior research fellow at the Centre de Gestion Scientifique at Ecole des Mines in Paris. Her academic research is mainly focused on management of innovation and strategic change and the organization of R&D and design activities.

Magnus Finnström Prior to joining TruePoint, Magnus served as CEO of the Swedish management consulting firm Consultus and its sister organization Consultus Management Institute. Magnus also spent seven years at global telecommunications giant Ericsson during the 1990s leading many of the company’s most critical business development and operational endeavors. As a consultant, Magnus helps large companies structure honest conversations throughout the organization, identifying barriers to process improvement and instilling learning capabilities for adapting to changing business conditions. His work in an assortment of industries has enabled companies to reduce costs, improve employee morale, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance stakeholder relationships. Magnus holds an MBA from Warwick Business School.

Tobias Fredberg Since the late 1990s, Tobias has researched and consulted in a vast array of industries. Combined with his work in TruePoint and the TruePoint Centre, Tobias is on the faculty of the Chalmers University and a research fellow at the Technische Universität München. His research focuses on strategic change and on the management of innovation. He currently heads two large projects in those areas, as well as an international network on innovation research. He has published in a larger set of books and journals. His publications include the July 2008 HBR paper “The Uncompromising Leader” (with Beer, Eisenstat, Foote and Norrgren).

Kathleen MacDonald Kathleen – or Kathy – has nearly 20 years experience delivering improved performance and leading change, in corporate roles and as a consultant. At TruePoint, Kathy has worked with leadership teams on strategic alignment and organization design in the health care and retail industries. Prior to joining TruePoint, she worked at Timberland as Director of Strategic Initiatives and as Director of US Marketing, at McKinsey & Company where she served senior executives in the retail, consumer products and financial services industries, at Key Bank where she built a marketing function for the education finance group, and as an independent consultant.

Thomas Rice Internationally recognized for his expertise in leadership coaching and organizational alignment, in the past 25 years Thomas has consulted with more than 200 organizations in the public, non-profit, and private sectors. He is CEO Emeritus of Interaction Associates as well as co-founder and Chairman of The Interaction Institute for Social Change. Previously, Thomas was Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University and a Research Associate at Harvard University.

Christopher Richmond Chris has spent nearly three decades as a chief executive managing change in finance-related businesses. A GE Officer from 1997-2001, Chris led three different businesses during his 11-year tenure at GE Capital, growing Commercial Equipment Financing into a $40 billion business and quadrupling profits. Previously President and COO of Syska and Hennessey, the nation’s largest engineering firm, and Executive Director of The Dormitory Authority of New York, Chris is Chairman of e-Credit in Boston.

Derek Schrader Derek’s diverse career spans managing and management consulting for technology, financial services, and retail companies in the U.S. and across the Asia/Pacific region. Prior to TruePoint, Derek advised CEOs for Marakon Associates in Singapore, managed products at an Idaho high-tech startup, and was a Panasonic marketing manager in Tokyo and Jakarta. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he received a Society for Human Resources fellowship, and is fluent in both Japanese and Indonesian.

Richard Shafer Dick is widely recognized for his research and practice focused on business leadership and strategic human resource management. He is Associate Dean for Corporate Relations at the Johnson School at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell in 1997, Dick was a partner in Deloitte Consulting and national HR Director for Deloitte & Touche LLP for 12 years, after holding a variety of senior executive positions at Corning.

Malcolm Wolf Malcolm Wolf has more than 20 years experience of consulting to some of the world’s leading corporations on critical issues of strategy, performance, organisation, and IT. He was formerly a Partner at McKinsey where he built and co-led McKinsey’s IT practice in the UK, and has also been a Partner of KPMG where he built and led an M&A Business Advisory practice in TMT sectors. Malcolm is keenly interested in helping ambitious leadership teams to make great strategic decisions despite uncertainty and complexity in the business and organisational context. He is a co-founder of Strategic Decision Partners, and a mentor on London Business School’s Entrepreneurship programme. Malcolm holds degrees in both Philosophy and Chemistry, and was awarded his PhD in Computational Chemistry by University College London in 1984.

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