LaserBeam—a leadership consulting and coaching firm—
works globally with top executives who want to aim higher,
think smarter and thrive amidst historically rapid change.

About Us

Our Mission

LaserBeam Consulting helps businesses and their leaders to get change right - and sustain it, motivate the best talent and give them the right environment in which to shape powerful ideas. But leaders rarely accomplish more than they shoot for. So we enable them to reimagine what can be done, see the bigger possibilities and get where they want to be.

We are committed to business innovation (getting to “best”), transformation (driving market-changing opportunities) and speed. Most important, we make the big ideas work and develop great leaders. And we make even the best businesses and organizations measurably better: clients seize new opportunity, see extraordinary growth and build the cultures to sustain it.

LaserBeam Consulting gets remarkable results.

About Us

Our Team

LaserBeam principals are recognized experts and accomplished agents of change, and we work with an international network of trusted and talented colleagues.

As a group, we bring diverse expertise in a wide range of industries and circumstances. But we share a faith in leadership and innovation and an insistence on excellence and growth.

We relish the creative, strategic partnerships we develop with clients. And we take great satisfaction in seeing those individuals and organizations achieve extraordinary success.

Change agent. Thought leader. The words get thrown around so easily these days it’s hard to know who is really making change happen or truly leading thought. Roz Courtney is the genuine article.

As pragmatic as she is passionate, Roz brings her clients a wealth of experience with Fortune 500 corporations, smaller high-growth companies, non-profits and universities. Before founding LaserBeam Consulting, she held senior leadership positions at Citigroup, The New York Times Company, Primedia’s Consumer Media Group and Kraft General Foods. With an international network of leaders in businesses ranging from financial services to digital media, Roz offers a global perspective and cutting-edge insights into markets, strategy and leadership transformation.

CEOs and other top executives turn to Roz Courtney as a trusted confidante, sounding board and coach. Her clients see immediately her deep understanding of leadership and innovation, and her talents for bringing people together, dissolving obstacles and creating sustainable change and growth. Roz seeks clients who face challenges with candor and want real-life solutions—with a significant Return on BCC (business and cultural change). She sets a high bar for achievement and clients surprise even themselves: They unleash the real potential in their businesses and careers, leapfrog competitors, amaze customers and constituents and rapidly increase revenue and profit.

LaserBeam’s work is grounded in ongoing original research including an eight-year study of innovative leaders at the top of their industries and a series of rigorous interviews with C-level women. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, Roz led a two-year collaboration between business honors students and nationally recognized CEOs. The findings revealed a new approach to leveraging Gen Y talents in management and innovation and building new generations of leaders. The LaserBeam Leadership Innovation Model™, one of many tools based on Roz’s research, delineates a clear connection between what leaders think and do, and what they are able to achieve.

Roz has led executives in uprooting entrenched practices and accelerating growth, resulting in market-changing opportunities and record increases in revenues, profits and employee satisfaction. She has orchestrated or designed more than 40 business transformations. At Citibank, her team won the Global Quality Award for innovation and business gains. The Federal Reserve Bank of NY recognized this work as a "best-in-business."

A compelling keynote speaker and leader of executive forums, Roz developed and led a Reuters Newsmaker: “Women Leaders—Changing Business Leadership” and the Wharton School’s Inaugural Women’s Leadership Forum. In these and many other cases, sponsors give her their highest praise for bringing together celebrated leaders, her provocative line of questions, and how she is able to keep “standing room only” audiences engaged in animated discussions.

A recipient of many awards, Roz was the first woman to receive the Wharton Alumni Award for Distinguished Service, joining a list of Fortune 500 CEOs and other luminaries. She was founding co-chair of Wharton’s Global Women’s Initiative, sponsored by the dean, to advance women’s leadership in business. She is an alumni blogger on The Wharton Magazine website.

Roz herself revels in new ideas and challenges. She’s a fan of NYU Neuroscience Professor Wendy Suzuki’s IntenSati workouts, a design enthusiast, student of iconic companies and trendsetters and an alumna in good standing of The OpEd Project. She earned her MBA at The Wharton School, was a political science fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Penn State.

Sharon Terry is a rigorous and innovative thinker with a will to win. A highly effective coach for individuals and teams, she has a track record of helping top executives make and implement clear, strategic decisions in tough circumstances. She can quickly spot and dissect opportunities as well as problems, and help companies align talent, culture and strategy.

Sharon has worked with a wide variety of companies, from Kraft General Foods, Analog Devices, Kenner-Parker Toys* and Mars to Western Union. Having spent formative years at MIT earning her MBA, she enjoys working in complex businesses in technology and financial services as well as high growth start-ups. At Western Union, she led major aspects of a total business transformation that successfully took the company from bankruptcy to sale.

At Analog Devices, Sharon served on the leadership team of a high-tech startup charged with converting its very strong R&D into a highly profitable business. The team re-worked the company’s mission and strategy, set new goals and led a complex execution. Sharon’s talent for breaking down silos and creating new partnerships was crucial; Analog’s accomplished engineers and newly emboldened marketing professionals quickly established a new and effective alliance. Within a year, the business had exceeded its goals for customer satisfaction, and raised revenue and profit substantially.

Sharon’s nurtures her creativity and experimental bent in her off-time. Eclectic best describes her interests, which range from cooking to visual arts. She is also a fan of professional and amateur improvisational theater—especially when her children are performing—and an enthusiastic early adaptor of technologies. She lives with her husband, son and daughter in Lake Forest, Illinois.

*Now part of Hasbro

About Us

Clients

We work with executives and their teams who want to create extraordinary results and build their capabilities as leaders. Our clients are generally senior leaders in large and mid-size companies, entrepreneurs in companies poised for growth, and private clients from many industries and specialties.

Media

  • American Lawyer Media
  • New York Times Company Magazine Group
  • Primedia Consumer Media Group

Technology/Technology Services

  • Analog Devices
  • Thomson Reuters
  • TractManager

Financial Services

  • Bank of America/U.S. Trust
  • Citigroup
  • Citibank Private Bank
  • Western Asset Management

Consumer Products

  • General Mills
  • Kraft Foods
  • Hasbro
  • Omnilife USA, Inc.
  • Umbro

Healthcare/Medical Devices

  • Dynamic Research, Inc.
  • Infa-Safe, Inc.

Government

  • City of Atlantic City
  • U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD)

Automotive/Consumer Electronics

  • Avis
  • Ford

Leadership Education

  • The Wharton School
  • Seton Hall, Stillman School of Business
  • Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • Right Management Consultants

Professional Services

  • EverGreene Architectural Arts
  • National Association of Women in Construction
  • Vrabeck Client Management

Telecommunications

  • Alcatel Lucent
  • AT&T
  • Sprint Nextel

What We Do

Leadership & Innovation

At LaserBeam, we believe that leadership and innovation are the most important drivers of results today. We use both to help clients excel—to build and leverage their vital assets and to achieve their results—whether they come to us for a specific problem, a comprehensive strategic shift, or anything in between.

LaserBeam helps you define the best path to success and accomplish what you want most.

Lead the market. Leading companies transform markets and pursue new avenues for growth. We help you to grow your business, leverage new talents and build capabilities that can’t be duplicated.
> SEE ACCELERATOR PROGRAMS

Take leadership to new levels. Together, we’ll create the best leadership approach to achieve your business vision and bring it to life. Alliances will thrive; people will see new spikes in innovation, spirit and results.
> SEE THE NEW RUTHLESS

Accelerate or transform growth. We work with clients to envision or map out change and drive it. They reimagine growth, cultivate new sources of collaboration and deepen their customers’ sense of connection to the brand.
> SEE DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS

Recast your business culture. Even the most brilliant strategy needs the right culture or the wrong one will hobble it. We’ll build on strengths, and shift the mindsets and dynamics that damper performance. New behaviors and results ignite excitement in every corner.
> SEE FULL-SWEEP TRANSFORMATION

Translate strategy into measurable results. The best-laid plans will disappoint unless the tough or invisible issues are resolved. We prepare organizations for growth and arm them with the ideas and tools to achieve impressive results.
> SEE GETTING TO BEST

Our coaching and executive programs are designed to produce immediate impact. We believe that the fastest way to develop great leaders is to work with them directly on current agendas and their most pressing problems. Even as we focus on executives’ substantive issues, we help them make powerful changes quickly.

We use our original assessment tools, always adapting them to a client’s needs and challenges. Working closely, we encourage clients to think big and set ambitious but realistic priorities. We help them delineate the steps to take, target the skills to sharpen and measure progress.

We coach executives to raise their game in perennial leadership areas: productive relationships, targeted networking, powerful presentations, personal marketing and branding, situational leadership and business development. We help businesses adapt to global competition and a convergence of market forces in ways that work for them even as these demands change.

Our clients find working with LaserBeam principals satisfying and inspiring, and see immediate and long-lasting changes in how they think and work.
> SEE ACCELERATOR PROGRAMS

Core Studies

Some of our most important research involved an eight-year study of leadership and innovation. We interviewed over 100 top executives who had repeatedly reinvented their companies and organizations, built vibrant new businesses or transformed entire markets. There were striking patterns in the leaders’ stories: virtually all had a distinct and innovative mindset about business challenges, matched thinking to action, and generated bold agendas for growth and innovation.

LaserBeam conducted extensive in-depth interviews with C-level women across continents and industries. And we pioneered a two-year collaboration between business honor students and nationally recognized CEOs that produced key insights into leveraging Gen Y talents in management and innovation.

New Research

LaserBeam regularly surveys business and other leaders on pressing economic, strategy and cultural issues. Tapping our international network of leading executives and professionals, we are able to do substantive, on-the-ground research. We are happy to collaborate with clients on research, and we welcome inquiries.

LaserBeam creates tools and protocols based on our hands-on experience in global business, our own research, our network of experts, and the best of the research and reporting we read.

Clients find that these tools help them target exactly where they want guidance and how their investment will pay off. Executives are able to focus on the high-impact items for professional accomplishment and company results. Our track record shows that they gain the competitive edge in strategic skills, innovation and change that leads to extraordinary performance.

Two of our most powerful tools:

LaserBeam's Leadership Innovation Model™ helps leaders see and build on the connection between what they think and do—and the results they achieve. It’s designed to help individuals and organizations achieve extraordinary results by defining and reinvigorating their leadership. It provides a simple roadmap that identifies priorities, next steps, and sequencing, and measures accomplishments.

LaserBeam's Leadership Appraisal™ helps clients to move beyond role descriptions and simplistic or impressionistic evaluation systems. Companies and leaders can: define jobs and develop careers in more definitive ways, identify strengths and vulnerabilities, and apply specific and reliable metrics. Even the most capable executives can take their leadership to new levels of impact.

Your project. Your pace. Real results. Whether you want major strategic shifts, a talent or leadership assessment, or a targeted coaching session, we’ll design just what you need, on your timeline. Here are a few programs to put you on a fast track.

Re-Create Leadership. You want to push the envelope—do what your competitors can’t. But you miss a strong consensus and a definitive view of how to get there. We can help you define and create the leadership that will take your company to a new level with real buy-in.

Boundary-less TeamPower. A team is only as good as its teamwork, vision and capabilities. We’ll help you to communicate better, produce more and move outside your usual circles of influence. And we develop concrete ways to solve problems, leverage all strengths and build anew.

Strategy-Culture Fit. Culture is powerful when it supports strategy, dangerous when it gets in the way. We identify the values, practices and messages your company lives by and see where culture helps or hurts inside, in the market and the virtual world. Then we’ll create an action plan to strengthen culture and the concrete things that shape it.

Reinvent Your Relationship With Change. Leaders already have a relationship with change; they have to master it. Happily, leading big or complex change is a competency. It’s complex—involving mindsets, culture and collaboration. We’ll arm participants with the invisible strategies and techniques to create a new energy for change and the skills to drive it.

C-Suite Harmonics. Great teams are essential everywhere, but nowhere more than at the top. Your team should set the tone for the entire business, help you do your best thinking and call you out when you don’t. And they must execute faster than ever. Let us make sure you get the best from your team.

Competitive Edge Retooled. Your market is changing overnight; business is putting a new premium on collaboration, innovation and partnerships; even brilliant competitors need to reassess, refine and redirect. We’ll help you refresh your competitive view; or hone your organization’s skills as competitors, collaborators and partners.

Brainstorming Turbo-Charged. You’ve seen the news reports: research proves that brainstorming doesn’t work. We say, “The headlines got it wrong: Most brainstorming doesn’t work.” We can help you use brainstorming, idea labs, working sessions and other techniques to drive innovation, strategic and operational change.

Case In Point

Building New Generations of Leaders

Summary

The dean of a university business school hired us to create and implement an innovative development program that would challenge leadership honors students and bring them closer to the rapidly changing business world. The program, created with the students, elicited passionate participation and attracted top CEOs to work directly with them. It led to challenging corporate jobs; fresh academic research, increased visibility for the university; and new, usable insights on Gen Y leadership for the business community.

Building New Generations of Leaders

Challenge

We wanted to create a transformative leadership experience for 15 students while developing their leadership skills. We charged them with the major, real-life tasks of leadership and innovation: defining, funding, selling and executing an initiative of their own making, and receiving feedback on their leadership. The students would engage with top leaders on the ground, and at the same time change the way the business elite viewed their generation.

Building New Generations of Leaders

Deadline

Our timeline covered 24 months, but we had to move fast. We had eight weeks to stake out the problems and present our findings to the administration. We would then have four months to develop the mission and final business plan, and persuade the administration to fund the initiative. The active work on the project, analysis of results and presentation to the dean would take 15 months.

Building New Generations of Leaders

Defining the Problem

The students conducted a preliminary assessment of the business school, its curriculum, culture, and approach to leadership development and did a broad brush of current leadership thinking. They found that:

  • Much more could be done to raise the marketability of the school’s business students and its stature in industry. The undergraduate program ranked below the top tier in Business Week’s annual survey.
  • There were few opportunities to interact with business leaders in their companies, especially those at the forefront of their industry or field. The students had no idea about how leaders approach and manage growth and innovation.
  • Press coverage, which was largely critical of private businesses, focused on political solutions to grow businesses in a shrinking economy. Gen Y was seen as a problem with little recognition of their potential to contribute.

Building New Generations of Leaders

Taking Action

LaserBeam coached the students to develop a big idea, sell it internally, overcome tremendous hurdles and execute. The team developed a full-blown business plan and created analytical models and an innovative social media strategy and marketing plan. We:

  • Initially exposed the students to the latest thinking in leadership; then asked them to identify priorities for substantive projects. We helped them transform their objectives into a first-of-its-kind initiative.
  • Measured significant changes in the students’ leadership skills, mindset and actions by using rigorous peer, advisor and self-assessments.
  • Prepared the students to lead substantive interviews with C-level executives. The process unveiled a deeper understanding of forward-thinking leadership and innovation, and opened doors for new career ideas and relationships.
  • Engaged recognized leaders in 90-minute interviews, all with impressive records of growing and transforming businesses and markets, such as Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft; Dave Checketts, Chairman of SCP Global; Craig Binetti, President of DuPont Nutrition & Health and Chairman - Solae.

Building New Generations of Leaders

Results

The research findings, rich and unexpected, identified how successful executives think about complex change and drive it, and how Gen Y can contribute as leaders and innovators.

  • The students held their own with CEOs, deans and academic skeptics; showed how Gen Y does its best work and what it takes to keep them engaged.
  • The team developed a unique view of business learned only by working closely with exceptional innovators and change agents.
  • The students owned the initiative and devoted large blocks of personal time; they called it ambitious and revolutionary.

Feedback

Tom Curley, President and CEO, Associated Press: “You have a very big idea and are offering the students a breakthrough way to learn. Someday they’ll really appreciate it. I was very impressed on all fronts, and the students were serious – which made it fun.”

Ashlee Wiechkoske, Time/Warner Retail: “Roz’s ability to connect with Gen Yers and move us toward an exciting vision for our initiative was unparalleled. LaserBeam stretched our abilities, motivated us and helped us to produce incredible results. The initiative opened a floodgate of career opportunities for me, and valuable business relationships.”

Case In Point

Full-sweep Transformation

Summary

A new CEO had an urgent and ambitious agenda: transform a large publishing group with disparate businesses into a multimedia powerhouse. An intensely competitive and changing market had sparked anxiety throughout the company; its future was on the line. LaserBeam did a fast but substantive analysis of the business and organization that pointed to several key problems; one was a politically charged and divisive operating environment. We developed a new strategic mission and launched a plan of concrete steps to expedite change.

Full-sweep Transformation

Challenge

With big-picture and day-to-day changes in the market, it was critical for senior leadership to re-design and integrate its traditional and digital businesses into a formidable competitor. That meant revamping virtually every function, from design and production to marketing, and implementing change among 180 business units in 25 locations. The business’ capabilities and culture did not support the collaboration and communication needed to move fast.

Full-sweep Transformation

Deadline

We had eight weeks to pull together a cogent strategy—including a brand new model for leadership. That meant in-depth and new definitions for key jobs—and tough decisions on the talent that would fill them. We needed to set goals, energize the brand, and revamp expectations, compensation and incentives for a media business’ key asset, its human capital.

Full-sweep Transformation

Defining the Problem

To find the company's fault lines and strengths, we led focus groups and interviewed managers and leaders. We found that:

  • Management’s assumptions about what its consumers wanted were obsolete. Investors were increasingly impatient to see higher revenue and profit. The company's brand was weak.
  • Leaders had attacked the competitive problems—and opportunities—reactively; they had no comprehensive strategy for reinventing the business. Major issues were unresolved such as how to redefine key executive roles and how to build new franchises from existing brands.
  • The internal climate was politically charged, with executives split on the most critical issues: strategy, tactics and people. Leaders, preoccupied with putting out fires, couldn't focus on the big issues. A layered hierarchy stymied communication.

Full-sweep Transformation

Taking Action

We urged the leadership team to clarify the company's goals and to redefine roles and standards, starting at the top. This helped senior leaders articulate and implement the change with a new level of communication and transparency. And we created concrete steps and tools to use in implementing and tracking change. We:

  • Launched an initiative to create a new vision, brand and strategic imperatives.
  • Worked closely with senior executives to develop serious role descriptions and accountability for leaders, managers and key contributors. The leaders completed a rigorous evaluation of the performance of current talent and talent they needed, and initiated changes.
  • Led a new Leadership Forum for 140 executives and created a virtual communications system for all employees. Both initiatives were designed to open up conversation, encourage innovative thinking and push for change.
  • Orchestrated programs to involve a broad range of key players and employees in re-design efforts. Rolled out a communications strategy that worked for different professional disciplines in divergent markets.
  • Developed targeted plans with concrete steps for resolving differences, getting buy-in and resolving sticky issues. Demonstrated new cultural standards for transparency, inclusion and innovation.

Full-sweep Transformation

Results

Within five months, the organization was more focused, direct and decisive, and making choices that aligned with a newly refined strategy.

  • The virtual Leadership Forum became a vital tool for communicating, integrating business initiatives, and inspiring innovation.
  • A more collaborative culture took root, inspiring leaders, managers and employees to embrace the change process, understand their new roles, and accept new expectations and rewards. Leaders clarified expectations, metrics, accountability and job progress, and held to crisp, new standards. Managers reported a sense of ownership and a new play-to-win mindset. The culture changed in tone, from “we don’t like it” to “we want this, and we're the ones to build it.”

The company created a stronger public profile and a clear and more powerful presence in new media and integrated sales and marketing. Those teams built stronger relationships across businesses and with clients. Unit heads called the new strategies “breakthrough,” and reported that they led to more creative, lucrative deals. From the head of one major business: “This was a truly inspirational experience; a turning point in my business.”

Case In Point

Getting to Best

Summary

A leading global financial services company had failed at repeated attempts to move its private bank into the top competitive tier. Client dissatisfaction was unacceptably high and the many of the best bankers were leaving. Management wanted to reverse those trends, upgrade banker competence, and accelerate revenue growth.

Getting to Best

Challenge

Leaders were divided on human capital issues that directly affected banker motivation, retention, the business culture, client satisfaction and business results. Senior management had struggled to develop solutions, hampered by infrastructure, technology and the difficulty of measuring product costs, profitability, client profitability and productivity of staff. Managers, skeptical that anything could be done, proposed solutions that dealt only with aspects of the problem, and then only superficially.

Getting to Best

Deadline

Top management wanted a new strategy implemented in every market worldwide within 16 months. Interim deadlines: four months to redefine world-class performance for key positions, followed by a vetting process to validate performance standards, and program approval.

Getting to Best

Defining the Problem

We conducted detailed interviews in 18 countries, with over 65 market managers, regional and product heads, bankers, influential clients and industry experts. We found that:

  • The bank had no consistent expectations for its bankers; bankers had no reliable definitions of the performance and results expected and how to achieve them.
  • Managers had trouble articulating and identifying the best practices for bankers; their systems for tracking performance for complex clients were inadequate. It was almost impossible to compare banker performance from market to market.
  • Managers felt the compensation program failed to motivate top performance; bankers had no reliable way to predict their compensation.
  • Leaders and staff were cynical about the bank’s ability to solve the most glaring issues or pay for exceptional performance. The complexity of the business made it difficult to design globally consistent compensation, incentives, performance standards and team structures across diverse markets.

Getting to Best

Taking Action

We added critical capabilities in leadership, communication, and program design to a demanding project and turned it into a global initiative that ranked among the bank’s top five business priorities. We:

  • Led an interdisciplinary global team in creating roles, standards, performance targets, and a reliable system of compensation and incentives.
  • Developed a comprehensive program including cutting-edge assessment tools, a new career ladder for individual contributors, development programs tailored to the bankers’ needs, and a global compensation and recognition program—all of which resonated across five market regions.
  • Connected the private bank mission and brand to the expectations of all staff working directly with clients.
  • Created a clear message for all leadership communications with bankers, staff and corporate officers.

Getting to Best

Results

Culture Change

Our work transformed the culture, team structure and internal beliefs about the company’s commitment to being world-class.

  • We made success transparent and put it within reach of all professionals in client-facing roles and product sales.
  • We credibly linked a validated assessment system to career advancement and compensation.
  • Impressed with the program’s clarity and connection to results and the change in culture, every product group asked to have its own system.

Business Results & Stature

We accelerated revenues and growth and raised the bank’s stature.

  • Bankers dramatically increased the number of ultra high-net-worth clients, in some markets nearly doubling revenue per client in three years.
  • The bank achieved unprecedented levels of client satisfaction and global brand recognition.
  • The program won awards for innovation and results, including the company’s Global Quality Award. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recognized it as a “best-in-business.”
 

LaserBeam Consulting
180 Griffen Avenue
Scarsdale, New York 10583

t 914.725.0033

info@laserbeamconsulting.com