Allan Henderson
Allan Henderson is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and he devoted much of his previous career to issues involving economic development of less-developed countries and cross-cultural understanding and cooperation. He combines the knowledge and perspective gained in those endeavors with direct, personal experience in founding and running for-profit enterprises in the U.S. and Asia, and brings both philosophical and practical depth to consultation, coaching and organizational development.
Allan has been consulting organizations—large and small, public and private, charitable and profit-making—on four continents for nearly 20 years. He works especially in extended engagements helping leaders and managers to focus on long-term concerns and to implement transformational change in their organizations.
At the heart of all Allan’s work is a commitment to the transformational development of organizations and their leadership. He has conducted numerous, multi-year programs inside such companies as Numasho (Japan), Technip (Malaysia), Asian Sources Media Group (Hong Kong and Singapore), Bantrel (Canada), UMN (Nepal), the Richland Operations of the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Washington Division of URS (USA).
Much is written about and attempted in the field of organizational change. Success, however, is infrequent. Clients who are faced with difficult choices or diminishing futures come to Allan to facilitate change efforts—and, in the process, to rekindle passion in the hearts of people throughout the company. For example:
- When two major pharmaceutical firms merged, Allan was called in to help them deal with the ramifications in their Japan operations.
- When a large, privately-held Hong Kong company decided to go public, Allan worked at length with all the executives and senior managers to assess and prepare for the impact of the change.
- When an old, established American steel company decided to diversify for the first time in order better to weather industry cycles, Allan and his colleagues were called in to help them bridge the gap between the gate keepers of tradition and the champions of the new.
Over the years, Allan has conducted programs within Country Offices to support more effective internal collaboration; as well as at Headquarters in full-fledged organizational-development programs. The largest of these efforts to date has been his work co-designing and facilitating the Leadership Development Programs of UNDP’s HIV/AIDS Group. Over the past seven years, he has conducted programs ranging in length from seven months to three years in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Gambia, India, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine and Vietnam. These programs have unleashed the commitment and fuelled the actions of literally thousands of leaders in the HIV/AIDS response in those countries, and have provided a platform for developing hundreds of South-based facilitator-coaches.
