Irene Hughes - Alliance Director
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Biography
Irene Hughes is the Founder and Managing Partner of Essence Consulting, which specializes in change leadership and individual and organizational transformation. She is known for her innovative solutions to ordinary organizational dilemmas, and has over 25 years’ experience in the areas of business management, organizational development, strategic planning, executive coaching and training.
Prior to founding Essence Consulting, Irene held senior leadership positions at several spectacularly successful software start-ups that went public, including Arbor Software, where she lead the company through a product release re-engineering process that increased overall organizational effectiveness, client satisfaction and employee morale while reducing release costs and eliminating organizational silos.
Irene is co-creator of the Personal Sustainability Project (PSP), one of Wal-Mart’s key environmental initiatives. The program’s goal was to teach the company’s 1.2 million U.S. employees about sustainability, and to enable them to radically improve the company’s overall sustainability initiatives. PSP is now an integral part of the sustainability landscape and is used by many other consultants in their work with clients.
A partial list of her clients include: Monster.com, Earthjustice, Starbucks, Intuit, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Saatchi S (formerly Act Now Productions), Fidelity Investments, Cisco Systems, The Watershed Company, San Francisco Food Bank and Fenton Communications.
Irene is currently on the board of the Marion Woodman Foundation (www.mwoodmanfoundation.org), and is a member of the Association for Strategic Planning where she partners with University of San Francisco MBA students to create a forum for conversations about business sustainability strategies. She co-teaches a sustainability leadership class at UC Berkeley Extension and is currently writing a book about executive coaching. When Irene is not working with clients, she volunteers her time to mentor young girls at Girls For a Change (www.girlsforachange.org) and can be found kicking back at the beach or Muir Woods with family and friends. She resides in San Mateo.