Jocelyn Scarborough, former Vice President of Human Resources at CSAA, and current Vice President of Human Resources at SanDisk, offers this perspective on working with Lawrence Ellis as an internal and external consultant:

Situational Summary

California State Automobile Association (CSAA) is the second largest American Automobile Association (AAA) member in the 50-state federation of AAAs. As a 100-year old, multibillion company that has for decades been the brand leader in its field, CSAA needed outstanding consultants who could help the company build on its traditional strengths while moving into a rapidly changing future. They hired Lawrence Ellis to serve with a dual, dotted-line reporting relationship to the Vice Presidents of Operations Integration and Human Resources.

“I worked with Lawrence over a three-year period; first in his role as an external consultant and later as an internal consultant. Without a doubt, he is one of the absolute top consulting professionals I've known over the course of my several-decades career. He's one of an extremely rare handful who is top-tier in both Complexity-Science Organizational consulting and Organizational Development consulting. He brings an amazingly effective and rare combination of people skills and process savvy, with a strong focus on results.

In the field and at headquarters, we were able to use Lawrence’s talents in several key areas, especially organization redesign, executive coaching, team development, and process counsel & design:

Lawrence was the project lead on my division’s redesign, and used a highly participatory process to help us shift our fundamental operating model, helping us to transform a reactive bureaucracy. The redesign used a unique blend of traditional Organizational Development (“OD”) approaches with Complexity-Science Organizational (“CSO”) ones. We used all of the rigorous OD practices that one would expect (e.g., conduct a thorough environmental scan and competitor analysis, refresh the mission, generate an updated compelling vision, select core strategies based on the above, drill down into qualitative and quantitative work process analysis, design systems and structures to deliver on the strategy in line with optimal workflows, etc.)  However, all of the OD approaches worked in tandem with CSO ones. For example, Lawrence led the Management Team and Core Design Team (representing all functions and levels of the Division) through a series of CSO educational workshops, which we then applied to our Division to arrive at an unusual helix organizational model. He then led two other consultants in setting up fairly self-organizing redesign teams in the departments throughout the Division. With consistent support from Lawrence and his colleagues, these teams generated many of the on-the-ground structures and systems of our new organization. These and other CSO approaches are the kind of thing you dream about, or read about in textbooks – but rarely does anyone have the know-how to pull them off on a large scale. He did – and with outstanding results. We aligned with corporate strategic business imperatives, consolidated several functions and established a new business-partnership model, enabling us to become more cohesive, productive and responsive — all while reducing our budget by $2 million without layoffs.

Lawrence also functioned as a coach to several executives. As my coach, he foresaw the possibility of certain scenarios and — more than a year in advance — convinced me of the need to prepare for those scenarios. This wasn’t easy, since my plate was more than full. Taking on extra work to prepare for a future scenario that wasn’t guaranteed to happen was far from attractive. However, I saw the wisdom in his advice, and agreed to the work, which we built into our goal-setting and action-planning sessions. This particular piece of coaching turned out to be one of the best in my entire career. One of the scenarios he envisioned did occur, and I was more prepared for it than anyone — myself included — could have imagined.

In an organization of more than 7,000 employees, he was easily among the top one-percent in terms of productivity. When I was collecting internal customer data for his first performance review, I remember how many of his internal customers were shocked to learn that he was working only 50-percent of his time on CSAA assignments. A few joked that they thought he worked time-and-a-half.

In addition to his competencies and accomplishments, of note is his consummate integrity, his strong role as a team player, and the respect and trust he earned from people of all levels throughout the organization.

If the opportunity were to arise, I’d hire him again in a second."
— Jocelyn Scarborough, former Vice President of Human Resources, CSAA and Vice President of Human Resources, SanDisk

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