Rich has been an observer and practitioner of innovation and employee engagement processes for over 20 years. He has over 13,000 hours designing and facilitating leadership and interpersonal skills workshops, and innovation explorations with teams to help them jump-start their change and innovation efforts.

He has helped teams as small as 8 and departments as large as 100 learn how to blend external developments (to understand where customer needs are moving) with internal employee engagement processes (to show how to stimulate internal experiments and capitalize on those opportunities). Rich also enjoys helping leaders grow by focusing more on people skills and less on technical ones. He brings an experiential approach to his work with client teams. His clients value the engaging way he works with their people whether facilitating a leadership workshop, working with a specific team, or challenging employees to be more accountable for the whole.

Rich spent time learning about instructional design and change management at Accenture, helped Square D Company develop and implement their TQM programs and processes, and developed the leadership curriculum and internal consulting practice at Baxter Healthcare during his time as an internal OD practitioner. For the last 8 years of his practice, he has been following the intersection of Innovation and Design Thinking.

Rich received his M.A. in Training and Development for Business from Ohio State University and has been consulting faculty for the University of Notre Dame’s College of Business since 2000. He is the author of, Rules of Engagement: A Story About How Leaders Can More Effectively Engage Employees. And he co-authored Tapping Team Intelligence: Exercises that connect team members, engage their creativity, and foster collaboration.