The Cottingame Company

Harvard MBA in
training, motivation,
and change management

About Don Cottingame

Don Cottingame's unique approach to personnel and organizational development grew out of his early experiences working in his father's various businesses. In particular, he noticed that the particular business ran better when either he or his father were physically present, and likewise that operations slowed and backlogs occurred when they were both off-site.

Determined to understand the effect, Don began to study why some employees were able to do their jobs effectively in the absence of direct supervision while others were not. This led him to focus his college studies on the management of performance and change in organizations. After earning his degree in Business Management, he set out to apply what he had learned.

The results of organizations he worked in improved nicely, but Don continued to be challenged by the observable decline in productivity that occurred when he was not present. While he worked on this problem, he received an opportunity to attend the Harvard Business School. There he studied with the premier minds in employee development and motivation. He achieved his MBA in 1964 with a specialty in training, motivation, and change management.

Over the next 20 years, he built an impressive track record of turnarounds in underperforming organizations of all sizes, in a wide range of industries. Still, the problem remained of consistently achieving the best results without his personal, direct, day-to-day involvement. Don began to search for tools that could help him identify and develop self-motivated performers.

He found many tools, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that could identify and categorize broad abilities, but none that could reveal the underlying dynamics of working with individual skills and preferences or that could show participants how to work better together. This led him to create his own instruments, which he began using in 1985. They immediately proved their worth, producing surprising results in rapidly growing and changing organizations.

Refined over the past 20 years, these instruments, along with additional techniques and experiences Don has developed, now comprise an integrated methodology that has contributed to the successful advancement of individual clients as well as organizations of more than 100,000 employees.