Board of Directors

Emily Axelrod co-founded the Axelrod Group, a consulting firm that pioneered the use of employee involvement to effect large scale organizational change. She now brings more than thirty plus years of consulting, coaching and teaching experience to this work with clients including Boeing, Calgary Health Care, Naperville School District 203, U K National Health Service and British Airways.

Emily is a founding member of the Berrett-Koehler Authors Co-op and currently the President. She co-authored You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done and Let’s Stop Meeting Like This with her partner Dick Axelrod.

Joan McArthur-Blair, Co-President, Cockell McArthur-Blair Consulting, is a powerful speaker, writer and facilitator who grounds her work in a deep passion for learning, change and the possibilities of a positive future. She brings to her consulting work over 25 years in higher education from faculty to president. She is a poet; the author of many articles on Appreciative Inquiry; and two co authored books, Appreciative Inquiry in Higher Education: A Transformative Force (2012) and Building Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: A Leadership Journey through Hope Despair and Forgiveness (2018).

Kristen Frantz is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Berrett-Koehler Publishers. She has worked at Berrett-Koehler since 1992 and currently oversees the areas of promotion through communications, digital marketing, promotional materials, and social media, as well as, sales to US trade bookstores, corporations, associations, and authors.

She is passionate about helping authors share their ideas in the world in an effort to promote individual, organizational, and societal positive change.

As a writer, speaker and content creator, Ed calls attention to the way workers, customers, owners and society all can succeed through wise, inspiring company cultures. He is co-author of three books: A Great Place to Work For All: Better for Business. Better for People. Better for the World (2018); Organized Innovation: A Blueprint for Renewing America’s Prosperity (2013); and Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era (2011). Ed spent two decades as a journalist focused on the intersection of business, technology and work. He currently serves as Senior Director of Content at Great Place to Work Institute, the research and analytics firm that produces the gold-standard FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For list. He also writes regularly about work, culture and masculinity issues.

Ed lives in San Francisco with his wife, Rowena Richie, and their two teenage kids, Julius and Skyla.

Stewart Levine improves productivity while saving the enormous cost of conflict  using Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration (1998, 2009) which was an Executive Book Club Selection, featured by Executive Book Summaries, named one of the 30 Best Business Books of 1998, and called “a marvelous book” by Dr. Stephen Covey. The Book of Agreement has been endorsed by many thought leaders, called “more practical” than Getting to Yes and named one of the best books of 2003 by CEO Refresher.

He is an honors graduate of Rutgers University Law School. He teaches for The American Management Association, the University of California Berkeley Law School and Dominican University Graduate Business School.

Pete Neuwirth is a retired actuary with over 35 years of experience as a retirement consultant. He now researches and writes about “Holistic Financial Wellness” with a particular focus on the effective use of home equity to provide retirement income.

Pete has a B.A. in mathematics and linguistics from Harvard College and is a Fellow of both the Society of Actuaries and the Conference of Consulting Actuaries. He is the author of numerous technical papers as well as “What’s Your Future Worth?” which was named by Wealth Management as one of the 10 best business books of 2015. More of his writing is on his website.

Karen Phelan is an international best-selling business author, speaker, and co-founder of Operating Principals, a change management consulting firm that uses simple practices to effect big changes. Her specialty is using findings in neuroscience to create innovative and effective organizational change interventions. Karen has over a dozen years of consulting experience at Gemini Consulting (CGE&Y) and Deloitte, has held several management positions at Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, and has two degrees from MIT.

Her book, I’m Sorry I Broke Your Company, is an international best seller and was named one of the ten best business management books of 2013 by the Toronto Globe and Mail.  You can more about her at operatingprincipals.com.

Jackie’s passion is working with others to discover their strengths and dreams. She is the author of Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement and is recognized for her creation of SOAR, a positive approach to strategic thinking and planning. She is a professor at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) and Appreciative Inquiry Advisor for the Flourishing Leadership Institute. She has worked across all sectors, including for-profit, nonprofit, government, and a wide spectrum of industries.  She lives in Brighton, Michigan, with her husband, Paul; their kids, Ally and Adam; and Rex, a lovable dog

Cheri is a lead catalyst for positive change, speaker, and President of Collaborative by Design. She specializes in communication and culture change, working with leaders to transform negative or limiting workplace dynamics into high performance teams. Leaders learn to foster productivity and meaningful engagement, sparking creativity, high energy, and enthusiasm for organization and community aspirations. She has authored numerous books and articles, her most recent is author of Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaning Engagement.

After years of working as a business strategy consultant with top IT firms, in 2003 Dana Brownlee founded Professionalism Matters an Atlanta based corporate training company.  An energetic and innovative speaker and trainer, Dana has thrilled audiences with speaking events across the U.S. and globally.

Rated as the #1 Leadership Influencer on Projectmanagement.com, her business expertise has been featured by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Redbook, Working Mother, Forbes.com, and other notable publications. Her first book “The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up: Project Management Techniques from the Trenches” was published by Berrett-Koehler in February 2019. A nationally recognized speaker, Dana speaks to groups large and small on a variety of topics including tips for rescuing your meetings, dealing with the difficult boss, secrets of the “Thoroughbred Leader”, and discovering the keys to true work life balance. 

She holds a BS, BIE, MBA, and PMP.

Jeff Kulick is currently on the Marketing Faculty at the School of Business at George Mason University. He teaches a number of courses in marketing, international marketing and international business. He has been named a Dean’s Teaching Faculty Fellow with the School of Business, a Teacher of Distinction at the University and recently the 2018 DMAW Education Foundation O’Hara Leadership Award.

Jeff has been involved with and reviewing manuscripts for Berrett-Koehler since 2000. He has reviewed at least 100 manuscripts. He previously served on the BK Authors board from 2013-16.

Prior to joining academia, he was a planning, marketing and OD consultant, and an executive in nonprofit organizations in Chicago and the Washington, D.C. area.