Associates

Iris Bagwell is an executive coach and organizational consultant in independent practice. Iris has over thirty-five years of experience helping individuals, pairs, teams, and organizations improve their effectiveness by helping them learn to reflect on themselves and their relationships in new and more productive ways. Her work combines the best thinking from psychology and organizational development, thereby enabling senior executives to grow beyond their present limitations by understanding the interface between their environment, their character structure and their work performance.  Her practice often combines customized training programs with focused coaching.  Her clients include a wide range of corporate and non-profit settings. Iris earned her master's degree in Counseling Psychology from Northeastern University, and has extensive post-graduate training in psychology and organizational learning.

Todd Cook helps organization build internal capability in the areas of leadership, change management, and talent development.  A major part of his work is focused on coaching executives and facilitating teams working on critical business issues.  He is experienced working with both Fortune 100 companies and emerging entrepreneurial organizations in a variety of industries.  His clients have including AlliedSignal, BP, INSEAD, Penn State, Johns Manville, Grainger, and Shell. He has been working with Action Design since 1993.

Gwen Krause is an international trainer and coach with 20 years of experience teaching professionals to communicate, negotiate and broker differences collaboratively.  Her purpose is to provide dynamic development programs that effectively blend proven theory with practical and sustainable skill building.

Gwen’s professional experience is diverse and she has worked as a Senior Associate for Action Design, Vantage Partners, Mobius Executive Development, and The Alternative Dispute Resolution Center in Rome.    She has facilitated training programs in 17 countries for clients including:  IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Lexmark, Deloitte and Touche, HBO, MTV, DDB, Capital One, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, sanofi-aventis and McGraw-Hill. Gwen’s background in communication and conflict resolution draws from her work with the theories developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project and the work of Chris Argyris, developed by Action Design.

Gwen holds several certifications including:  The Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Technical Leadership (Blessing White), Situational Leadership (Blanchard Partners), Strategic Relationship Management (Vantage Partners) Career Development and Lifescapes (Masteryworks). She is a past Board Member of the New York Chapter of The International Association of Career Management Professionals. She currently serves on the Board of the Northeast Health Foundation.

A graduate of Brown University, Gwen received a Bachelors Degree in English. At Brown, she also designed and completed an independent major in Performance combining Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Theater and Dance. At the graduate level Gwen has completed several courses in Organizational Development and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University and The New School for Social Research.  As an adjunct faculty member Gwen as been an instructor for The Action Design Institute, Columbia Business School Executive Development and DDB University.

Annie Marks has over thirteen years of consulting experience in the areas of organizational development and change, executive development, coaching and organizational learning.  She has worked in a wide range of industries, including media, financial services, construction, non-profit, high technology and pharmaceuticals, and within a wide spectrum of business contexts, including the implementation of new technologies, organizational restructuring, strategy implementation and company-wide business process change.  She has also worked internationally with large multi-national organizations, having spent four years living and working abroad.

Annie applies her knowledge of organizational systems, dynamics and groups and her advanced facilitation skills in supporting executives and teams through handling particularly difficult conversations and situations, enabling her clients to develop new solutions to recurring organizational barriers and dynamics.  She works with individuals and teams to uncover important and often conflicting assumptions, information and thinking that can block learning, a fundamental process in healthy organizational life.  She is particularly interested in helping groups function when faced with important, multi-layered decisions, complex authority structures, competing interests and interpersonal and group dynamics.   She has designed, implemented and led teams through comprehensive change programs to support change at the individual, team and organizational levels.   

Annie worked for Arthur Andersen’s Business Consulting ‘Strategy, Organization and People’ practice for eight years in New York and London.  For the past six years, Annie has been working as an independent consultant and coach in New York.

Annie has received her MBA in Management/Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and her MA in Organizational Psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  She is Associate Faculty for Action Design.  Annie is a graduate and faculty member of the Organization Program at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.  She is also adjunct faculty at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and is regular guest faculty in the Columbia Business School MBA and Executive Education programs.

Bill Noonan is an educator and consultant with an international practice including many of leading learning organizations. His practice includes facilitation, executive coaching, conducting workshops and designing web-based learning programs: Forging Breakthroughs with Peter Senge (Ninthhouse) and Productive Business Dialogues and Managing Difficult Conversations (Harvard Business Review Publishing Company).  He is the author of Discussing the Undiscussable: A Guide to Overcoming Defensive Routines in the Workplace, published by Jossey-Bass (2007)

He received a BA from University of San Francisco, Masters from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union/ UC Berkeley. He teaches at Marylhurst University in the Business Department, and the Religious Studies Department. He teaches the Philosophy series at Columbia Gorge Community College.

John is a co-founder of foreAction.com. He established the company in 1999 to provide interim management and coaching services to Silicon Valley companies.  His clients have included Atheros Communications, SHPS, Netcentives, Alta Vista, Audience and Tallwood Venture Capital. 

Prior to founding foreAction.com, John was a consultant with the Catalyst Consulting Team, Santa Cruz, CA. His major focus at Catalyst was to help corporate managers align with changes in strategic direction. He also established an executive coaching practice to help senior executives work more productively with others.  Prior to joining Catalyst, John was head of international business development for InfiNet.  In 1994, John founded WorldNews Online, the first Latin American news aggregator on the Internet to carry daily news in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. 

John has worked as a management consultant in various roles since 1979. He was the business case study writer for Sterling Livingston, a noted Harvard Business School Professor. He helped pioneer the development of case-oriented, microcomputer-based business simulations, developing major simulations for the advertising, entertainment, chemical and newspaper industries.  He holds a BA from Antioch College and an MA in psychology from Duquesne University.