Linda specializes in helping companies work through large, messy, complicated change efforts. She is particularly adept in settings where people feel stuck and overwhelmed. Her logjam breaking optimism is one of her strongest project management skills — as is her ability to tap into the natural rhythms and drivers of the client setting.

Linda has the experience of an insider: she faced and solved similar problems during her years as Director of Planning for central computing at Penn. However, her strength is her ability to see the situation as an outsider. From working as a journalist and as an anthropologist, Linda has taught herself to see patterns and themes where on the surface others might see only isolated events and confusion.

Her analysis involves taking in just about everything — even things as mundane as people going about their work — and treating it as data.

Skills/Knowledge/Abilities

• Organizational Development - Builds capabilities that support strategic directions
• Initiative Design - Knows how to pull together people and resources to support change efforts
• Systems Thinking - Understands the complex ripple effects set off by actions taken in one part of an organization or industry

Recent Projects

• For a large research university, worked with the new CIO to develop strategy for academic computing.
• For a multi-billion dollar insurance provider, worked with the client to create and put in place a performance-management system that fits the company's culture.
• For a major foundation, helped devise a "fieldbuilding" approach that amplifies effort and lifts constraints.

Professional Facts

Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Former Director of Planning for the Office of Information Systems and Computing, University of Pennsylvania

Worked as a journalist for an English-language newspaper in Iran and was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Texas

Selected Writing

 

"Clinical Leadership on the Unit and at the Top—a 'Swiss Army Knife' for Sustained Performance" (with PJ Brennan and Victoria Rich), University Health System Consortium, September 2008.

"Stress in the Nursing Department" (with L. Hirschhorn). In Jenny Firth-Cozens and Roy Payne eds., Stress in Health Professionals: Psychological and Organizational Causes and Intervention. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1999.

"The Campaign Approach to Change: Targeting the University's Scarcest Resources" (with L. Hirschhorn). Change, May/June 2000.

"Sociolinguistic Research on Human-computer Interaction-A Perspective from Anthropology." Social Science Computer Review 9:4. Winter 1991.