Samuel A. Culbert has developed a blunt yet sensitive way of framing situations so that all forces driving people’s opinions and actions, including the subjective, self-interested, and political, can be matter-of-factly considered and explicitly discussed. Throughout his career he has creatively welded three activities: consulting, teaching, and writing. Consulting is where he encounters work effectiveness problems in their contemporary forms, learns how they are being dealt with, and finds challenge in coming up with new ways of engaging them. Teaching provides forums for extrapolating from problems to issues and, through give-and-take interaction, for probing underlying dynamics to identify which assumptions and resulting practices need upgrading. Writing is where he brings it all together to package his understanding for public consumption.
John Ullmen is currently a senior manager for organizational effectiveness at Earthlink. He is in the dissertation process of a Ph.D. in management at UCLA with a study that focuses on cofounder relationships in entrepreneurial firms. Ullmen has broad independent consulting experience in teambuilding, management coaching, network analysis, organizational change, and business development. He has been a consultant in the Management Communication Program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for the last four years and a consultant for several Internet start-up businesses. He holds a B.S. degree in engineering mechanics from the Air Force Academy and an M.S. degree in public policy from Harvard University.
