"David Stroh worked with the Board and senior management team of Woolworths in 1998/99 at a time of major change in the Company. He worked closely with the new Managing Director and his executive colleagues to set a mission and vision for the business, agree on its key strategic priorities, and engage and energise the whole company behind these.

From a group of highly competent senior functional managers, he helped create a strong, focused and aligned business team. He was challenging and uncompromising in the standards of output he required—both in his personal and coaching relationships with us as individuals and in the wider Executive Team.

He worked with us in a year where we delivered our best financial results ever. The sense of common purpose that pervaded the organisation following David's work with us helped achieve bottom-to-top alignment of our priorities. We moved a long way in a very short period of time."

"Marilyn worked with us for over a year and a half and helped us make steady progress towards becoming more of a learning organization. She is a skilled presenter, effective facilitator and outstanding consultant. She was instrumental in helping us bridge a challenging year with key leadership changes. In the time that she worked with us, she enabled our skills as a leadership team to improve substantially. We are looking forward to working with her again for we appreciate her clarity, her profound skill in identifying the critical issues, her commitment to working through difficult conversations, and partnering with us to move to our next level as a system."

"We received enormous value from bringing program and administrative staff together to deepen their skills in systems thinking.  The staff achieved meaningful improvements in both our grant-making and managerial effectiveness by learning new technical skills, understanding how to use these skills in ways that create real change, and then applying both technical and change management tools to projects of great importance to the foundation"

"The Executive Time Management program enabled our organization to understand the root causes of our difficulties in managing time. Individual members of the organization learned through great content and exercises to better manage information, reduce phantom workload, make SMART requests and commitments, and increase meeting productivity. We now want to work with David and Marilyn to apply these skills collectively so that we can assure that the most advanced current knowledge about medical informatics is incorporated into clinical information systems at Partners."

"David was instrumental in helping eJNJ refocus its priorities by guiding our management team to understand how various and sometimes conflicting drivers of our business were related. We were then able to clearly see our engines of growth, anticipate potential limits to success, and identify the few areas where we could focus resources to achieve the highest impact with lowest risk. Thanks to David’s help, we’re also more aligned as a team and more easily coordinating our efforts within a rapidly changing environment."

"I joined The Home for Little Wanderers as the new President/CEO in February 2003. I was to head a team of seven members of an Executive Management Team
(EMT). My assignment as the new President was to become more externally focused, and to develop the EMT to become more comfortable and facile with
shared accountability and decision-making for the work of the organization.

David helped the team to develop communications skills, facilitate more effective and productive meetings, improve collaboration across the various departments of the organization, and align around a strategy for achieving one of our mission-critical initiatives. He provided individual executive coaching to me, and to each member of the EMT, which was extremely helpful as I oriented to a new role and members of the EMT oriented to a new executive. David also facilitated several conversations with members of the board to clarify the respective roles of board and management.

Our team has made tremendous progress over six months of working together. As the team grows and changes, we plan to have David continue to work with
us. He brought an extremely practical knowledge of systems and how they function, an excellent theoretical framework within which to think about our work, and outstanding facilitation skills."

"Marilyn did an excellent job of helping our cross-functional committee identify what was most important to us and articulate a coherent and comprehensive set of principles on a critical issue. She facilitated our meetings, helped us write drafts of the document, and educated us on change management. She was particularly adept at helping us link the challenges of fostering patient safety with the equally great challenges of building a responsive and flexible institution. She helped keep us moving forward and was great to work with. We are very pleased with the results thus far. We have created a comprehensive and cutting-edge set of principles that will be the basis of significant organizational change."

"Our management team has continued to work closely together and deliver outstanding results since we used the Team Leadership Program three years ago. I believe the quality of our country management team is well recognized both within the Bank, and most importantly in our client countries."

"Most recently, Marilyn facilitated a staff retreat where she helped us revisit our values and develop the skills and strategies that we needed to build a truly connected group of staff members. We had many new people on staff and the retreat proved to be a powerful orientation session for all of us. We have worked with Marilyn on different projects over many years. She is one of those rare people who can help us with management skills, coach us through difficult conversations, and connect this work with our Jewish tradition."

"Marilyn is a terrific coach and consultant! She helped me identify and change some key factors that enabled me to do my best as a manager in our fast-paced environment. Last year my direct reports were asking me for faster responsiveness, enhanced feedback, and optimal levels of coaching and guidance. Marilyn worked with us to address these needs and take action as a team. I also made tangible changes in my management approach that had immediate, dramatic effects. Recently, my direct reports called my team the envy of the department. Even in the heat of battle, I am able to remain effective. I am delighted with the improvement that I have made and look forward to more."

"My commitment to dig into my own shortcomings combined spectacularly with David's broad experience in corporate consultancy, knowledge management and personal growth. My time with David helped me to shine light on my strengths, yet not rely on past success patterns in new circumstances where they might not apply. I came away understanding simple, coherent causes for previously mystifying unproductive moods and motivations, which enabled me to prosper in situations where before I had just coped.

I recommend David as a coach and management consultant. Anyone could benefit from his years of experience and clear advice. Those who are really motivated to seek lasting internal change and personal growth will find that David is a catalyst for improving your interpersonal and organizational effectiveness."

"Thanks, David and Michael; it was a pleasure to work with you both! I learned so much, especially the difference between changing a particular system and leading systemic change. You helped involve our consumer – homeless people – in developing the community’s ten-year plan to end homelessness. You expanded the view of service providers so that they are now committed to helping the consumer overall instead of just “doing their own thing” as individual organizations. Agencies took a hard look together at their individual and collective responsibilities for failing to end homelessness, and recognized that their emergency work hides the problem and reduces community pressure to solve it. The goals of our new plan to end homelessness derive directly from your analysis of the whole system and identification of leverage points to achieve a sustainable solution."

"We have benefited a great deal from the contribution of Marilyn and David to the work of the Center for Children and Youth at the JDC-Brookdale Institute, and to its Unit of Learning from Success. They actively engaged participants from the schools we serve, our partners at the Ministry of Education, and our own staff in a discourse on the conceptual issues related to our program, "Learning from Success as a Leverage for Learning in Schools as Organizations.” This enabled us to be much clearer about what we are actually doing and to chart a "road map" for our work. We look forward to continuing our work with them in the coming year."

"The Hopkinton Civic Engagement Committee, hired David Stroh to facilitate a day-and-a-half forum for 110 citizens from Hopkinton. The focus was on dialogue and building bridges between people across the town.

David was a great match for what we needed! Not only did he have an in-depth knowledge of systems, a clear idea about the essential elements that contribute to successful dialogue, and an appreciation for the complexities of change, but he also showed a great deal of respect for the skills of the committee members. He worked with us to design the forum to fit our vision, rather than imposing a pre-determined format. He was flexible, resilient, and used just the right touch of humor to keep us moving. His facilitation – and thorough training of small group facilitators drawn from volunteers – made the day an unqualified success. As one measure of the outcomes we achieved, 48% of the participants volunteered to further the civic engagement process at the end of the forum!"

"David was instrumental in building on the participants' previous conflict analysis work and taking it to a new level. The resulting conflict map showed the dynamic relationships among the key factors of the conflict they had previously identified. This helped them see how their current efforts were connected to the big picture, and how they might align their efforts more effectively."