Jim Stengel - Rethink business, branding and life

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The Jim Stengel Company, Consulting Services

The Jim Stengel Company is a team of catalysts who work to change the narrative and behavior of business through a focus on higher ideals, thereby dramatically improving results. Our consultants are a special group of people, diverse in their thinking and backgrounds. They are long-time colleagues and friends, yet all bring something unique to our clients. Learn about our consultants and see what they bring to the table.

Renee Dunn
Renée Dunn

As a corporate human resources leader and consultant, Renée Dunn has built a strong track record and successful reputation in strategic and energizing HR and organization effectiveness. She is known for enabling her clients to achieve game-changing results by tackling organizational issues, building strong partnerships with her clients and their employees, and serving as a highly effective business resource, coach and mentor.

Prior to launching her own consulting practice in 2009, Renée had a successful 25-year career at Procter & Gamble. There, she delivered significant results in creating and implementing HR systems across business units and functions in the United States and across the globe. From 2001 to 2006, Renée served as the HR director of P&G's global marketing organization, where she provided HR leadership to the renewal and restructuring of P&G's marketing function in partnership with Jim Stengel and his leadership team.

Today, Renée continues to provide expertise in the areas of executive coaching; team development and facilitation; strategic planning and deployment; performance and talent development systems; organization assessment, design and development; and change management. She has served a number of clients in the consumer goods, construction and facilities management, consumer electronics, and nonprofit industries.

Renée holds a master's degree in management from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, as well as a B.S. in industrial engineering (with a concentration in organizational behavior) from Northwestern University.

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Benoit Garbe
Benoit Garbe

Benoit Garbe, vice president of Millward Brown Optimor, leads key global brand strategy assignments and ongoing business development initiatives. He and Millward Brown Optimor are long-time collaborators with Jim Stengel, going back to Jim's tenure as global marketing officer at P&G. Most recently, Benoit has been working closely with Jim on his book, "Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies."

Having previously worked on the client side, Benoit lends a depth of perspective and insight into the client experience. He advises clients on how to grow their businesses and transform their organizations through branding, with an expertise in portfolio management, brand architecture, brand-growth strategy, licensing and brand valuation in the context of measurement and analytics.

At Optimor since 2007, Benoit has supported companies such as Gucci, Microsoft®, Pepsi, P&G, Ritz Paris, Mayo Clinic and Vodafone.

Prior to his current role, Benoit was the global strategic planner for American Express® at Ogilvy & Mather. He held various positions in brand management and strategy at Nike®, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy and Diageo. He has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University and a speaker at numerous conferences on the topic of brand-value creation.

Benoit holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A. in marketing from Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Lille in France. While French is his native language, he also is fluent in English and conversant in Spanish. Benoit lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and young son.

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James Haskett
James Haskett

James Haskett is a results-driven, global-brand-building consultant with more than 25 years of success at Procter & Gamble and General Electric. He has built brands and worked with high-performance marketing organizations on six continents.

Prior to becoming a consultant, James enjoyed 22 years at P&G in marketing and general management, including more than 10 years outside of the United States in both developing and developed markets. Most recently, he spent three years as the first global vice president and brand franchise leader for P&G's $3-billion Always®/Whisper® brand, marketing to more than 1 billion women in 180 countries.

During his career, James has developed exceptional cross-cultural awareness, insight and listening skills via in-depth experience in seven categories, more than 80 countries and 12 trade channels. James has transformed insights into action, products into brands and ideals into growth.

Since leaving P&G in late 2010, James has helped accelerate growth for his clients by leveraging his expertise in positioning brands for success, managing complex change and building high-performance marketing organizations. His most recent work includes multiple projects for a major electronics company, ranging from defining how to win in rapidly emerging markets to transitioning from a product-centric to a customer-centric marketing strategy, structure and system.

James earned a B.S. in commerce and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia.

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Leonora Polonsky
Leonora Polonsky

Leonora Polonsky is a passionate brand strategist who has a proven track record in creating business-building strategies and superior organizational capability — both at P&G and with a range of clients across industries.

At P&G, Leonora held numerous line roles running brands and categories with consistently positive results. She also spent more than 10 years in P&G's corporate/global brand-building "engine room," defining and driving adoption of global best practices. From 2004 to 2008, Leonora was the general manager of P&G's Global Marketing Knowledge & Innovation Department, reporting to Jim Stengel. In this capacity, Leonora served as an internal consultant, working with P&G's billion-dollar brands, and played a pivotal role in several key brand turnarounds, including Pampers®, Crest® and Herbal Essences®. Leonora has been recognized as one of P&G's top marketers. In 2000, she was honored with the Harley Procter Marketer distinction, the highest marketing recognition (only about 12 marketers in P&G's history have been given this highest honor).

Since leaving P&G in late 2008, Leonora has leveraged her experience to help clients solve difficult brand-building challenges and develop state-of-the-art internal capabilities. Leonora's consulting has spanned industries that include consumer electronics, apparel, soft drinks, consumer durables, consumer packaged goods, spirits, marketing services, interactive agencies and automotive.

Prior to joining P&G, Leonora received her M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

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Jim Stengel
Jim Stengel

Jim Stengel is president and CEO of The Jim Stengel Company, a think tank and consultancy, conducting proprietary research, generating thought leadership and applying a new ideals-driven framework to drive business growth in today's global economy. His company's mission is to inspire business global leaders to achieve higher performance by rethinking their ideal and all the behaviors emanating from that ideal.

A prolific writer, speaker and advisor, Jim is the author of "Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies." In 2011, he was named to the first-ever "FORTUNE®" Executive Dream Team, and has been named multiple times by Advertising Age as the number-one "Power Player" in marketing. He was recognized as Grand Marketer of the Year by "Brandweek" magazine in 2005.

Jim also is an adjunct professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, is on the board of directors of AOL and Motorola Mobility, and serves as an advisor for MarketShare™, an industry-leading marketing analytics firm, and for Myrian Capital™, a private equity firm. He is the former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, one of the most admired brand-building companies in the world. P&G sales doubled during Jim's tenure as GMO.

Jim holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College, and an M.B.A. from The Pennsylvania State University (Smeal College of Business). Jim and his wife have two children, and split their time between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Coronado, California.

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Suzanne Tosolini
Suzanne Tosolini

Suzanne Tosolini is passionate about brands and their role in people's lives. With more than 21 years of experience as a brand strategist, she has worked with leading brands in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and North America.

For 18 years at P&G, Suzanne held both P&L and capability roles, which consistently resulted in brand turnarounds through careful repositioning of brand strategy and renewal of brand communication. For the last eight years at P&G, Suzanne was a director of a select global group of internal brand-strategy and communication advisors. Her work there involved creating, training and utilizing new best practices on brand strategy and communication. She consulted the leading billion-dollar brands on everything from brand equity, initiative strategies, architecture, communication execution and managing agencies. Her most recent role involved creating holistic and integrated communication best practices, including digital and communication planning.

Since leaving P&G in early 2009, Suzanne has enjoyed working with clients across the apparel, food, publishing, finance, automotive and consumer packaged goods industries to optimize their brands' positioning in the marketplace.

Suzanne also shares her time and passion for branding as a trustee at the Summit Country Day School in Cincinnati and as an advisor to The Brandery, a startup incubator focused on creating brands. Suzanne holds a master's degree in business and social studies from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she grew up in an Irish/German household. She currently resides in Cincinnati with her Italian husband and two young, high-energy boys.

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Selina Yoon
Selina Yoon

Selina Yoon is a proven brand builder, product innovator, strategic problem solver and entrepreneur. Her hands-on experience spans "FORTUNE®" 100 corporations, entrepreneurship and consulting across multiple industries.

At P&G in the 1980s and early 1990s, Selina held numerous line management roles and consistently built business. Selina's ability to sort and synthesize complex data, identify growth opportunities and create winning concepts in a strategic framework led her to create many new products on various brands. Most notably, Selina led the Always® brand to market-share leadership in the U.S.

In 1994, Selina left P&G to found Master Communications, an organization with the mission of helping children become global citizens. She created Culture for Kids, the first of its kind in the marketplace, and Asia for Kids™ catalogs. Selina has led, and continues to lead, development of more than 300 new products, including the very first Chinese learning book with audio and video components. She is best known for the highly acclaimed "Families of the World™" video series, which has been broadcasted on PBS and many other stations worldwide. Selina has extensive experience in digital technology, broadcasting, and brand and trademark licensing across all categories.

Her consulting work includes a major telecommunications corporation, international publishers and well-known trademarks. Most notably, she played a key role as a consultant to launch "Blue's Clues," Nickelodeon's first entry into Asian licensing. This involved localizing a TV series, arranging for daily broadcasting and initiating licensing and merchandising programs across all product categories and channels in Korea.

She was highlighted in the "Extraordinary Women" series on Lifetime® Television, graced the cover of "Businessweek's" "Frontier" Magazine and was featured in "FORTUNE." Selina, a native of Korea, is a former competitive figure skater and coached at the 1981 World Championships. She has an M.B.A. in marketing and economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a degree in mathematics and fine arts from Smith College.

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