Mitch Saunders - Alliance Director
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Biography
Mitch Saunders has a long history of guiding pioneering individuals and organizations through high-stakes transitions. He is the founder of SGRPartners, a consulting firm that helps companies achieve sustainable growth and returns. Mitch is also the creator of The Breakthrough Lab, a powerful “leadership flight simulator” that enables people to quickly generate and test alternative decisions and actions associated with personal and organizational transformation.
Mitch has a passion and gift for enabling leaders to tackle complex challenges and achieve extraordinary results. For example, he:
• Designed and led a series of executive team sessions that enabled a venture-backed, medical devices start up to rebound from a stalled business model and crippling quality issues—as a result the company doubled sales the following year;
• Enabled a corporate product development team to reduce time to market from 11 months to 9 weeks, while also decreasing defects (from 25% to 5%);
• Provided ongoing consulting and coaching to the CEO and executive team responsible for a $2.5 billion healthcare system, enabling them to boost operational effectiveness, while also bringing new offerings to market; and
• Coached the leadership team that converted one of the nation’s largest military bases into a public university in Monterey, California.
In addition to serving as a trusted advisor to hundreds of business executives, over the years he has also provided counsel to candidates for elective office, including individuals running for Governor of California and State Senate, US House of Representatives and President of the United States.
Mitch is a former researcher and teacher at the Organizational Learning Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, he led several extraordinary action learning initiatives. The first involved a multi-organization effort that catalyzed reform of the healthcare systems of Western Colorado. In another, he helped two major telecommunications companies negotiate an efficient end to an ill-conceived and unsustainable $400 million dollar joint venture.
Some of Mitch’s clients include: Aesthera, Agilent Technologies, AT&T, California State University, CTB/McGraw-Hill, Detroit Edison, Fidelity Investments, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Intuit, Kaiser Permanente, Lam Research, Motorola, Global Program on Negotiation at Harvard University, Shell Oil, and Sun Microsystems.
Earlier in his career, Mitch co-founded and led California Leadership, a statewide organization credited with helping to change the way public policy is forged in California, and also for preparing and enabling diverse emerging leaders to contribute to the process.
Mitch holds an M.A. from Santa Clara University and a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University. He lives with his wife and youngest daughter near Santa Cruz, California.