Marja Fox shares an article on leadership skills, effective learning, inclusiveness and business results through a positive approach to professional development. Looking back, it seems I’ve been coaching others my entire life – as an oldest child grabbing my brother’s hand in the parking lot, a middle schooler coaxing contributions out of reticent classmates or a lofty soprano singing louder than I should so others could learn the notes. It wasn’t until coaching became a formal part of my professional…

Ben Dattner co-authored this article published in the Harvard Business Review that offers insight on how to deal with an executive in the wrong role. Sometimes, executive coaching reveals that the person being coached is in the wrong role. When this becomes clear, bosses too often prematurely conclude that they have to fire the person or that the coaching was a waste. However, instead of seeing this…more In the traditional view of executive coaching, an executive, with her boss’s participation,…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Tatiana V Ridley with Ridley Global Advisors. Tatiana is an Ivy League educated strategy and operations leader with 18+ years of experience developing and implementing enterprise and business strategies for leading Financial Services and FinTech firms driving multi-million dollar revenue and profitability impact. Tatiana has successfully built, scaled and led high-performing teams at Fintech startups, a Fortune 500 technology leader and a top-tier global consultancy. She has a proven track record of leading and managing…

Marja Fox shares a blog post on the strengths-based approach to enhancing performance and fostering diversity. In a previous post, I laid out the case for a strengths-based approach to developing others: how it enhances performance and fosters diversity, what it is (and is not), what it requires of practitioners and what employee, coach and company get out of it. As strengths-based coaching has gained popularity, so too has it accumulated naysayers. While researching, I encountered a frequently-referenced source staking…

Stephanie Soler provides key questions that guide the development of an effective coaching plan. One of the essential tasks of a leader is to coach those who work for you. When it comes to creating coaching plans, most leaders are incomplete. They focus on simply identifying 2-3 development areas and checking in on them. The most effective coaching plans tap into what really matters to the employee, and address the root causes of what’s getting in the way. Here are…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Bernhard Heine with Professional Business Coaches. Bernhard Heine is a Business and Executive Coach at Professional Business Coaches, Inc., (PBC, Inc.) a company he founded to help business owners and leaders achieve their vision. Bernhard has more than 30 years of experience working collaboratively with business partners in all phases of business management, restructuring and transformation, particularly in: strategic planning, marketing and sales, organizational design, engineering consulting, project management, coaching and facilitation. Prior to forming…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Christophe De Greift with NEXUSQUANTS. Christophe De Greift has 15 years of experience in management consulting, part of it at The Boston Consulting Group and more recently running his own consulting firm focused on business analytics. Christophe has led 75+ projects in Latin America and Europe and has particular expertise in marketing analytics and supply chain analytics in sectors such as media, finance, logistics, consumer goods, energy and mining. He lives in Lima, Peru with…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Yevgeniy Rikhterman.  Yevgeniy Rikhterman spent three years as the Director of Strategy at Herff Jones, a PE owned CPG company. Yevgeniy has experience in creating strategic plans, as well as an evergreen strategic planning processes. Yevgeniy led the strategic planned that helped to maximize the value of Herff Jones during a critical PE transaction. He also led the corporate development, and M&A aspect, and as such has specific experiences that is applicable to mid-size companies…

  This in-depth article from Boris Galonske explains how digitization helps improve resilience in commodity trading. Commodity trading suffers from shrinking margins and in some commodity classes also from low price volatility. At the same time operating environments struggle with manual routines, legacy processes and systems resulting in high cost income ratios (CIR). How can this challenge be addressed and how can the profitability and the resilience of trading businesses be increased? Situation today Commodity trading exhibits still several manual…

Robyn M. Bolton provides a few inside tips on how to work with resource constraints and the people who control them when you need to access the resources that will fund your innovation.   The process of setting annual goals and budgets can be frustrating and even demoralizing for employees and managers alike as their visions and budgets get slashed in each round of management reviews. This process can be especially painful for Innovators who feel like they are expected…