Our Team
Gerald D. Pulvermacher, Ph.D., Partner
Gerry has 34 years of experience in executive and executive team development, executive alignment, strategic change leadership, and learning and development. He has worked extensively with clients throughout North America, Europe, and the Caribbean. His clients have included American Express, Merrill Lynch, Deloitte, Nortel, Bell Northern Research, IBM, the National Arts Centre of Canada and Prudential.
For 23 years, Gerry was Managing Partner of Pulvermacher, Stevens and Shack, and subsequently served 8 years as both Partner and Global Practice Director for Strategic Change, Leadership Development, Learning, and Organization Performance at Deloitte Consulting. Under Gerry’s leadership, the practice grew to over 1200 consultants operating in 23 countries.
Gerry has a Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology, and has focussed exclusively on Industrial Psychology since 1981. He is a co-founder of PulvermacherFirth.
gpulvermacher@pfleadership.com
Vincent D. Firth, Partner
Vincent, co-founder of PulvermacherFirth, has distinguished himself as a business and organization strategist, professional services executive and executive coach. He advises and provides executive coaching to numerous organizations, including Deloitte, Ingersoll Rand, Morgan Stanley, GE and Dupont. Prior to PulvermacherFirth, Vincent led Computer Sciences Corporation’s Transformation and Change Practice, and as a Senior Vice President was a member of the CSC/Index Consulting Executive Committee.
Vincent holds a Masters of Arts and Sciences in Organization Dynamics, from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Wharton School of Business. With Dr. Edward B. Shils, founder of the Wharton Center for Entrepreneurship, Vincent co-designed and taught “Internal Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovative Management” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Organizational Dynamics.
Andrea Zintz, Ph.D., Senior Vice-President
Andrea, a Senior Vice President of PulvermacherFirth, is a leader in human resources, organizational effectiveness and leadership development. Prior to joining PulvermacherFirth, Andrea served as Vice President of Human Resources for Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ortho Biotech, and played an instrumental role in growing the company from $40 million in sales to over $500 million over a six year period. She presently works with numerous companies such as Lockheed Martin, Lafarge, Chubb, Neutrogena, Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte and Merck -- implementing customized leadership development programs and human development strategies that foster organization growth.
Andrea holds a Ph.D. in Human and Organization Development and a Master of Arts degree.
Bari Waxman, M.Sc., Senior Vice-President
Bari Waxman, Senior Vice President, PulvermacherFirth, specializes in coaching executives to build leadership capability. She also has broad experience in developing and implementing talent strategies, leadership development programs and strategy facilitation to enhance organizational effectiveness.
Prior to joining PulvermacherFirth, Bari spent 18 years at the financial services firm Morgan Stanley. During her career at Morgan Stanley, Bari held a variety of leadership roles in both New York and London, including in Learning and Development and HR, leading global teams in partnership with the Finance, Operations and IT organizations to design and implement learning and OD programs aligned with business goals. Most recently, Bari held the role of COO for the CFO and the global Finance organization. In this role, she coached the firm’s key Finance leaders in addressing strategic business challenges and leadership practices.
Bari has been instrumental in developing women leaders and was part of the senior women committee that established the Annual Women’s Leadership Conferences and Speaker Series for high potential women leaders.
Bari has an undergraduate degree in Business from SUNY, Albany and a Masters degree in Organizational Behavior from Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a Certified Executive Coach from the ICoach New York program affiliated with the Zicklin Business School. Other certifications are in MBTI, CCL Benchmarks, MRG LEA and SPA assessment tools.
Edana Desatnick, M.B.A., Senior Advisor
Edana is a Leadership and Organization Development consultant and executive coach with broad experience in the professional services, consumer, healthcare and industrial products industries. Her work also includes strategic HR and talent planning, and change management consulting.
Edana’s professional experience includes having had worldwide responsibility for corporate Organization Development at Merck. In that capacity, she had responsibility for global leadership/talent planning, performance management and development, and led consulting/coaching to the senior management team on issues of change leadership and organizational effectiveness.
Prior to Merck, Edana was Vice President of Organization Development at Honeywell, providing OD leadership in the merger integration of the AlliedSignal and Honeywell organizations. She has also served as Senior Director of Organization Development at Nabisco Brands and Pepsi, and began her career in OD/strategy as a member of Coopers & Lybrand’s global strategy consulting practice.
In the area of non-profit, Edana provides her Leadership/OD experience and plays leadership roles on a number of non-profit boards including Matheny Medical and Educational Center and the Arc (the largest non profit serving persons with developmental disabilities) in their Government Legislative and Policy setting work.
Edana holds a M.B.A. from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in economics from Tulane University.
Michael Trottier, Ph.D., Senior Advisor
Michael has coached executives and executive teams for more than 25 years, gaining deep experience in the process of leadership development. In addition to executive coaching, his work includes strategy formulation, stakeholder facilitation, change management, and emotional intelligence. His expertise in leadership development has benefited organizations such as Curtiss-Wright Embedded Computing, Paradise Resorts-Bahamas, Alcatel, Nortel Networks, Mitel, Cognos, and Boeing, among others.
Michael completed doctoral studies (ABD) in systems and curriculum design. He holds a Master of Education degree, specialized in counseling, as well as Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts degrees.
Ann Laidlaw, M.Ed., PCC, Senior Advisor
Ann is an experienced coach and facilitator. She has worked extensively with executives and other high potential people to build self-awareness, remove barriers to growth, and align goals, plans and actions. Her clients include private sector companies, including Nokia, Cognos, and Tundra Semiconductor; and public sector organizations such as the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Health Canada, and the Bank of Canada.
Previously, Ann was Director of Employee Development for SHL Systemhouse (now part of EDS).
Ann holds a Masters in Education degree with a specialization in career counseling. She is also a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation, and a graduate of Corporate Coach University.
Joe Dougherty, Senior Advisor
Joe serves a wide variety of clients in telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare and higher education. He specializes in facilitating business planning and strategy, executive team development and alignment, leadership development, and executive coaching.
Since 1998, Joe has conducted the global leadership development initiative for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. This involved working with divisions of these business units in England, Spain, France, Italy, China, Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Singapore as well as in all of the U.S. locations. His clients in the telecommunications industry include Lucent, Alcatel, Bell South, MetaSolve, and Seimens.
In addition to his work with telecommunications firms, Joe has done extensive work in the manufacturing sector with clients such as: Tyco, York Label, GTE/Sylvania, Findley Adhesives, Mathews Conveyor, Caterpillar, ACCO Lifting Products, Harley-Davidson, SKF-Roller Bearings and Schindler Elevator. His work in health care has involved the design and implementation of performance management systems for such acute care health organizations as Anne Arundel Health System, Holy Spirit Health System, Monogalia Health System, and such long-term care organizations as Masonic Homes, Arbor Glen, Redstone Highlands and Glen Eddy. He has also done executive coaching and continuous quality improvement work with such organizations as Moses Taylor Hospital, Birch and Davis and Community Medical Center.
Through his distinguished academic career, Joe has served as Director of Continuing Studies, Wesley College and Dean of Continuing Studies, York College, Vice President, De Sales University, as well as Chairperson of the English Department at Wesley College.
John O'Leary, Organizational Change Consultant
John O'Leary is an organizational change consultant, management trainer and coach of executives and teams. As a consultant John has spearheaded many large-system change initiatives and turnaround efforts in the industrial and service sectors. As a trainer, he has conducted over 500 seminars on leadership, coaching, communication, and transformational change-and has trained other trainers to lead similar seminars for over 50,000 participants. As a coach, he has worked one-on-one with more than 800 individuals over the past 25 years. Throughout his career he has worked with pioneer thought leaders, including Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline), Fernando Flores (On Computers and Cognition), and Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence).
John's strength is his ability to help leaders and teams break the grip of belief systems that limit their effectiveness. Since his student days at Yale in the 1960s he has studied the effect of mental models and paradigms on individual, team, and organizational performance and has found innovative ways of freeing clients from self-limiting beliefs. His focus on the area of “coaching”-providing it to leaders and training leaders to provide it to their employees-has become a specialty of his in the last decade.
Recent clients include: J&J; Lockheed Martin; Deloitte & Touche; Commerce Bank; Cisco, and the US Army.
John is also the author of The Running Game, a humorous journal on politics and the media, which was excerpted in Harper's. His latest book-in-the-making is Cool Teams! Business Lessons From Rock & Roll Bands.
Carman Joynt, Senior Advisor
Carman Joynt is a Senior Advisor with PulvermacherFirth. Prior to that, he was a Partner with over 30 years of experience in the Assurance and Advisory Group of Deloitte & Touche.
At Deloitte, Carman was responsible for developing the firm’s extensive financial consulting and tax planning services to small and medium size business clients in the Ottawa region. Also, he served as the audit partner and the financial advisor to a number of not-for-profit organizations and owner-managed enterprises.
As a business advisor to Senior-most management, Carman has consulted with the CEO of a global consulting firm regarding his senior management team, advised several CEOs of multi-million dollar real estate companies regarding their strategic direction and operations and has coached and advised numerous CFO’s regarding business improvement strategies. He has also acted as a coach and advisor to business owners of medium-sized enterprises.
At Deloitte, Carman has been the lead client service partner on a number of telecommunication companies, agri-food organizations, not-for-profit organizations, manufacturing companies and other major profit oriented organizations. Some of the companies that Mr. Joynt has audited and served as consultant to, include Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport Authority, Bell Canada International Ltd., Boeing of Canada Ltd., Stentor Resource Centre Inc., University of Ottawa, Telesat Canada, Ottawa Housing Corporation, Export Development Canada.
Carman is a member of several Boards of Directors, including The Royal Canadian Mint.
Greg Smith, Senior Advisor
Greg has over 20 years of consulting experience. Through his career, Greg was the National Director, Merger & Acquisition Services, Watson Wyatt, Managing Partner for STRADA Change Management, and held senior management level positions in a number of corporations and the Public Service in Canada.
Greg has coached Executives and Executive teams with such mandates as developing Core Ideologies and shaping organization cultures (Micro-Electronics Center of North Carolina and Nova Scotia Power & Bangor Power), conducted Visioning and Legacy Building exercises (Spar Aerospace and North Carolina Biotechnology Center), provided Merger Preparation and Implementation Support (Aliant and Atlantic BlueCross Care), facilitated the development of Business Strategies (Tundra Semi Conductor and York Industries), aligned People Processes and Practices with Business Strategies (Yankee Gas and Canada Post) and developed comprehensive Learning and Knowledge Management Strategies (Bell Aliant and Canada Post). His client list also extends to Atlantic Lottery Corporation, Canadian Coast Guard, Cognos, Glaxo Welcome, Irving Oil, Mitel Corp, Nortel Networks and Public Works and Government Services.
Greg has written a number of articles for the Ivey Business School Journal. He undertook his post-graduate studies at American University in Washington, D.C., concentrating in Human Resources and Organization Development.
Wanda Parker, SVP Marketing, Canada
Wanda is PulvermacherFirth’s Senior Vice-President of Marketing for Canada, based in Toronto. Wanda held executive level positions in learning and human resources operations management, as well as business development. As National Director – Learning & Growth, at Canada’s top professional services firm, her team designed and managed employee and partner curriculum delivery, the top talent assessment and selection process. She led the implementation in Canada of the global SABA Learning Management system and related change management strategy. She chaired or was member of the Deloitte Global Learning Council, Global Learning Platform Advisory Council, and Canadian Learning Management System Steering Committee.
As VP Business Development, MICA Management Resources, Wanda advised her clients on leadership and management development strategies, created custom development solutions, developed processes and deployed resources to meet client needs.
Wanda has experience delivering the advanced assessment tools and Strategic Leadership Development Process of Management Research Groupâ’s and the Felix Global Audition and Facet 5 process. She is accredited on selected creativity tools of Dr. Edward de Bono, including Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking.
Her recent presentations include Strategy and Coaching conference focused on Leadership and Gender Differences and the Best Practices in Executive Education – Schulich Executive Education Centre (SEEC) Faculty Retreat, Dec 2007.
Wanda is an active member of the HRPAO. She is also a Director - Secretary & 1st Vice President on the Board of the Toronto Ski Club.
David Ryback, Ph.D.
An internationally recognized authority on emotional intelligence in the workplace, David has 25 years of experience in executive coaching, executive and leadership team development, leadership training and keynote speaking, all these across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Mexico. His expertise includes individual developmental executive assessments, team building, and his ability to work closely with executive groups to break through different viewpoints for greater team-oriented effectiveness.
Prior to joining PulvermacherFirth, David was a corporate consultant with Rohrer, Hibler & Replogle, consulted under the banner of EQ Associates International, and taught at various universities, including Emory University’s School of Business. He was a columnist for Speaker, the magazine of the National Speakers Association, and is currently a columnist for Business to Business magazine
David has a Doctoral degree in psychology. He is the author of Putting Emotional Intelligence to Work: Successful Leadership is More Than IQ (Butterworth-Heinemann), co-author of the recently published Psychology of Champions (Praeger) about the formula for ongoing success based on interviews with sports legends and super-athletes, and is currently completing another book, PeopleSmarts, along with Gerry Pulvermacher and Jim Cathcart.
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