Our Consultant Team

Our team is composed of experienced organization development, systems thinking/strategy, and social change consultants with a deep understanding of how to foster profound transformation in organizational and social life. They are highly skilled at partnering with leaders and teams at all levels and in all types of organizations and systems.

Individual consultants specialize in executive coaching, process redesign, executive team development, training design, culture change, sustainability, multi-sectoral relationships, lean production and project management.

Managing Partners

Ned
Hulbert

Mary Day
Mordecai

Jim Ritchie-
Dunham

Consultants

Conrado
Garcia
Madrid

Andrew
Leaf

Annabel
Membrillo
Jimenz

Luz Maria
Puente

Social Change Advisors

Orland Bishop

Nicanor Perlas

Ned Hulbert

Ned Hulbert Ned Hulbert co-founded Growing Edge in 1978. He specializes in working with CEOs and executive teams and in leading large-scale change projects. These initiatives typically involve executive coaching, senior team development, and cross-functional projects to align business units and support functions. Ned also designs, develops and manages leadership training seminars to support comprehensive change. His clients have included executive teams with Exxon Chemical, General Foods, United Airlines, and Equity Investment Group Companies.

In addition, Ned has worked extensively with smaller companies making crucial transitions and with public sector clients, including Peace Corps, Social Security, the FAA and local governments. He is active in an international NGO that is developing collaborative projects between government, private sector and civil society organizations. Ned also has consulted to independent schools.

Mary Day Mordecai

Mary Day Mordecai Mary Day Mordecai, a partner in Growing Edge since 1987, has extensive experience coaching CEOs and their executive teams. She has managed long-term organizational transformation projects for many of the company’s key clients. With Ned, she developed the firm’s comprehensive leadership training process, which enables key team skills to be cascaded throughout management ranks. Mary Day has also led multi-year projects with a number of international clients, including Engro Chemical in Pakistan and Intercor (Exxon) in Colombia.

Prior to joining Growing Edge, Mary Day designed and managed executive development training programs for Boston University School of Management. For several years, she was an instructor with Outward Bound, specializing in experiential courses for managers and executives. In addition, Mary Day has significant experience with not-for-profit organizations, both as a trustee and as an organization development consultant.

Jim Ritchie-Dunham

Jim Ritchie-Dunham works with senior leaders in corporate, civil society, and government to gain greater clarity about their organization’s strategy. He specializes in developing and applying analytical tools and processes, founded in the decision, systems and behavioral sciences.

Prior to joining Growing Edge, Jim founded Strategic Clarity in 1994 while teaching decision sciences and operations research at the ITAM in Mexico City. He is co-author of Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources. Jim also designs and leads executive training seminars on strategic decision-making and collaborative systems thinking. His clients have included executive teams of A.T. Kearney, CARE, Intel, NSA, PetroleosMexicanos, Royal Dutch/Shell, Society for Organizational Learning, and Thorlo.

In addition, Jim is an associate of the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Previously he was a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a professor of operations research and decision sciences at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), an advisor to the Mexican Secretary of Health, and a petroleum engineer at Conoco.

Conrado Garcia Madrid

Conrado Garcia Madrid Conrado García Madrid has extensive experience consulting, designing and applying strategic tools and methodologies to facilitate the development and testing of corporate strategies and business transformation initiatives. He has worked with private and public sector clients such as: Coca Cola, INTEL, KRAFT foods, Venezuelan Central Bank, Banco Nacional de México, PEMEX, Prudential Insurance, Bell Canada, Rolls Royce and Petróleos de Venezuela.

In recent years, Conrado has specialized in managing multi-stakeholder projects using dialogic techniques to bring together the perspectives of different actors involved with the organization, helping the development, communication and implementation of the strategy. Recent projects include large schools and water systems.

Additionally, Conrado has designed and presented executive education programs and conferences in México, USA, Canada, England, Turkey, Holland, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Andrew Leaf

Andy Leaf Andrew Leaf brings extensive experience in a range of training and management consulting disciplines. Prior to joining Growing Edge Partners, Andy was for seven years Vice President of the Organizational Communications Division of Burson-Marsteller, an international communications firm, and for five years Senior Consultant for Business Design Associates, an international management consulting firm. In these positions, he was responsible for the design and implementation of extensive change projects involving executive coaching, management and employee training, process redesign and organizational reconfiguration initiatives, and facilitation of broad-based employee involvement activities.

As Vice President for Development at Thomas Blodgett Associates, Andy was responsible for design, development, and delivery of sales, sales management, negotiating skills and related training programs. Additionally, Andy has had extensive experience in education, both in instructional and administrative roles, and remains actively engaged in educational reform. In recent years he has consulted to a number of independent schools on leadership and organizational issues.

Annabel Membrillo Jimenez

Annabel Membrillo Jimenez Annabel Membrillo Jimenez specializes in system dynamics/systems thinking modeling and the strategic analysis of those models. She focuses on identifying the main inherent dynamics of a problem, conflicts among decision-making groups, systemic indicators, leverage points and how those influence overall performance in order to develop stronger policies.

Annabel has extensive experience coordinating and managing multidisciplinary teams in projects in different sectors of the public arena, such as: community development programs, light and power companies, water management systems, among others, developing long-term relationships.

Prior to joining GEP, Annabel was Coordinator and founding member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) Mexico chapter, where she organized and managed large-scale events, inviting personalities such as Peter Senge and Arie DeGeus.

Luz Maria Puente

Luz Maria Puente Luz Maria Puente has extensive client experience in the banking, manufacturing and health care industries. Her focus on strategic and organizational development using various systemic and holistic approaches helps her executive clients to better align the organization with its values. Additionally, she designs and delivers development modules that support this alignment throughout the organization. Her clients include Banamex, CARE Latin America, Sensient Colors, Lawrence Boys and Girls Club, Sensient Flavors and the Texas Department of Health.

Luz Maria teaches strategic management courses at the Anahuac University in Mexico City and has co-authored several articles on strategic management. Previously, she worked for Banamex, developing the use of futures and options as a risk management tool for export-import companies in Mexico. She also worked in Citibank trading emerging markets debt instruments.

Orland Bishop

Orland Bishop Orland Bishop combines an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology and indigenous cosmologies with a deep dedication to human rights advocacy and cultural renewal. He was a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Violence at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles and has consulted for many human development organizations in the United States and internationally.

Orland is co-founder and Executive Director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, California, a unique organization devoted to the mentoring of young people and the creation of communities to support them. Orland personally counsels and guides dozens of young people at any given time and uses the core idea of “genius to genius” mentoring which helps to reveal the inherent gifts in each individual while seeking ways for each to live productively and originally in the world.

Through ShadeTree, Orland has pioneered approaches to urban truces and working with at-risk youth that combine indigenous wisdom and practices with contemporary methodologies designed to mentor the human potential and create intentional communities. He focuses on processes that support people to come into deeper inner and collective agreements in order to heal violence and social exclusion. Orland is completing a book on the first ten years of his mentorship and community-building work, soon to be published by Steiner Books.

Nicanor Perlas

Nicanor Perlas Nicanor Perlas has been recognized globally as an outstanding environmentalist, thinker, community organizer, and writer. In 2003 he received in the Swedish Parliament the “Right Livelihood Award,” which is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to improving the world. Earlier he received the United Nations Environmental Program’s Global 500 award, and the TOFIL Award, the highest award given in the Philippines to outstanding Filipinos.

Nicanor travels extensively internationally, giving lectures, seminars and workshops on globalization, sustainable development, social movements strategy, and on the vital link between spiritual development and planetary transformation. He has also authored over 100 monographs and articles on these themes and others including philosophy of science, strategic governance, epistemology and the second scientific revolution. At the same time, he has retained his local roots and provides strategic guidance to Lifebank’s micro-credit initiative for the poor which has reached 23,000 microentrepreneurs on the island of Panay.

Nicanor advocates ‘threefolding’, in which business, government and civil society are recognized as distinct organizing realms which can join efforts, where feasible and appropriate, to solve major world problems. This theme and civil society’s power to change the world is the subject of his most recent book, Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power and Threefolding, (2000), which has been translated in nine languages.