Our partners set a bar-raising example of collaboration with us and one another in service to better and better for clients and communities just down the street and around the world.
Optimizing Human Potential Within Organizations
JBL&A contributes to a better world by enabling valued, aligned performance for individuals and teams and sustainable business results in humane, accountable workplaces.
Performance Development Associates
Performance Development Associates is dedicated to helping people in organizations create high performance work systems using participative approaches to organization and process analysis and design, organization development, and change management.
Community
Our community includes facilitators, coaches, consultants, trainers, business analysts, project managers, program managers, psychologists, process engineers, knowledge management experts and systems architects.
Highly skilled at working across cultures, disciplines and organizational divisions, our experience turns differences into assets. All are Better Practice™ certified and have a track record of success.
Powered by Better Practice™ we deliver exceptional value.
Caryl Carothers
Caryl Carothers is an organizational and career consultant and President of Carothers Consulting. She connects people, ideas, teams and organizations to create new opportunities for synergy and growth.
Caryl is a certified Senior Birkman Consultant with over 15 years experience, is certified in the Lominger - Korn Ferry 360 and holds a certification with the Connective Leadership Institute.. Currently Caryl is an executive coach in the Executive Programs at UCLA Anderson School of Management, working with coaches in business, medicine, technology, manufacturing, education and the arts. Caryl has also worked for many years with non-profits in the Arts and Higher Education , and continues to work with the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
Contact: carothersconsulting@gmail.com
David Gerring
David is a governance practitioner with a 33-year history of success in dynamic environments and matrix organizations. He is a Certified Agile Professional, Scrum Master, and Better Practice Practitioner with vast experience managing large systems integration and custom software development projects. David has spent the last several years helping organizations and teams right-size their governance practices to not only leverage better project delivery techniques, but also improve overall project team and governance performance.
Contact: david.gerring@cgi.com
Gary Frank
Gary is an expert in operationalizing strategy through organization design. He holds a Ph.D. in Organization Development from the University of Colorado.
Over the past 35 years, Gary has consulted with organizations in a variety of industries including Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, R.W. Johnson, Ethicon, Roche, Howard University Health Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, StorageTek, Quantum, Coherent Technologies (now part of Lockheed), Kawasaki Motor Company, Purdue University, Trinity University, Microsoft, Clorox, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Contact: gary.frank@mac.com
Joe Slatter
Joe is the Founder and CEO of Better Practice. His mission is to help individuals and organizations accelerate how they improve and collaborate to create more value. He has lived in six countries and worked extensively with global, cross-functional and highly distributed teams over the past thirty years.
Joe has a history of success inspiring groups and organizations to create more value through collaboration, design thinking, change enablement, talent development, process design/improvement and organization design.
An engaging and dynamic speaker, Joe is passionate about helping individuals, teams and organizations of all kinds achieve and maintain high performance through collaboration and sustainable, continuous improvement. His practical and personable style inspires people to activate their best self and collaborate to drive growth.
Joe founded Better Practice with the belief that collaborators can improve their performance by establishing a common sense and listening to each other. A musician at heart, his upbringing and work over the past thirty years across countries, languages, cultures and industries has instilled a deep appreciation for the power of perspective and collaboration. Joe created Better Practice™ to help others quickly learn and apply the lessons he has learned over time. He lives in Colorado and supports projects, engagements and teams around the world. Joe orders his three most important roles as: 1. Parent 2. Teacher 3. Barista. #whatever3000
Contact: joe@betterpractice.com
John Brandt
John is an operations guru and a seasoned improv comedian. In addition to being the mind behind Positively Dissatisfied, John is a certified Better Practice Coach, Trainer, and Product Owner for the exciting whatever3000 project.
His wide range of professional experience includes small businesses (with multiple successful exits), multi-billion-dollar corporations, non-profit arts organizations, several industries, and roles ranging from "sales guy" to Chief Operating Officer. John holds a Master of Arts in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Business Administration from Benedictine University with concentrations in Management of Technology, Small Business Consulting, and Entrepreneurship. While he's currently residing just north of Atlanta, Georgia, John has lived all over the United States and worked with teams worldwide.
Contact: jbrandt@betterpractice.com
John B. Lazar
John B. Lazar, MA, MCC has been a performance consultant and coach since 1983, including more than twenty years as a leadership and executive coach to CEOs and Presidents, business owners, executives and senior managers through his company John B. Lazar & Associates, Inc.
In addition to his business coaching, he consults to companies on issues of leadership and management practices, communications, evaluation, emotional intelligence, executive team alignment, culture-strategy fit, and organizational change. He has made more than 90 presentations to audiences in the U.S. and a dozen other countries on four continents. He is a Birkman Master Certified Practitioner and Better Practice Consultant and Coach. John was a founding member and past President of the Board of Directors of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO). He is currently on the Board of Director of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI).
John has a master’s degree in clinical psychology and has been certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF) as a Master Coach since 1999. He received his coach training and certification from Newfield Network and advanced education from the Institute for Generative Leadership. He resides in Forest Park, a suburb of Chicago. John is a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan.
Contact: john@jblacoaching.com
kimberly dornisch
Kimberly is the Owner and Principal of kimberlylynnconsulting, LLC and Creator of Results, Visualized!
Kimberly leverages over 25 years of experience as a delivery consultant, Program Manager, and executive to lead and facilitate teams through strategic technology and organizational change. She has managed global organizations and successfully delivered multiple transformational programs, changing the way in which these organizations work and realizing hard dollar cost savings and operational efficiencies. The passion she brings to her work centers on creating innovative, new ways of working, and achieving the highest performance from the teams and organizations she works with. Through her career, she has honed her abilities to create meaningful, action-oriented meetings and discussions that are too often perceived as time away from “getting real work done” into memorable and powerful collaborations that accelerate results.
Contact: kdornisch@betterpractice.com
Newell Eaton
Newell’s specialty as a change agent is partnering with leaders and their teams to make transformational changes in their organizations – new strategic directions, new leadership, reorganizations, relocations, new products/services, collaborations and mergers. For over 40 years he has been fortunate to serve as a leader, developmental coach, and creative group facilitator for many organizations, locally and globally, in the private and public sectors. His passion is helping leaders create and grow prosperous organizations people love to work in.
Newell received his coaching and facilitation training from the Institute for Generative Leadership, the Creative Education Foundation, and the NLP Center of New York. He is a frequent workshop facilitator at creativity and change leadership conferences around the world. He is certified to deliver the Leadership Circle Profile, the most comprehensive leadership 360° assessment available.
Newell visits his home occasionally in the Hudson River Valley but thanks to the internet can now more often be found working, hiking, biking or skiing someplace else.
the company
Founded in 2011, Better Practice applies design thinking to improving how people work together. We work with partners, communities and organizations locally and around the world across industries, disciplines, generations and cultures. Together, we improve collaboration by design.
Better Practice™ creates shared value through education, training and coach-supported application of our unified collaboration and leadership framework and tools. Figure out what matters together. Make better decisions faster. Act together with grace and accountability. #whatever3000