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Marsha Kessler
In Their Own Words:
"For me, nothing is more professionally satisfying than helping people see their organization in a new light and knowing that they will make better decisions and take more focused action as a result. It's about connecting key pieces of the puzzle—what the strategy is, how work gets done, what gets measured, and where resources are focused. Organizations become more capable. Progress accelerates.
Recently, I had dinner with the founder and CEO of a cancer foundation that I worked with a few years ago. It's impossible not to be impressed with this top leader. She has raised millions of dollars, every penny of which has gone toward researching a cure to a rare, untreatable disease. She has leaders in the scientific community at major institutions around the world collaborating. There is a strong scientific plan, outreach to patients and doctors, education, government engagement, you name it. She patiently explains how this form of cancer is not as rare as people think and that answering key questions about it will shed light on far more common chronic conditions. She knows everything that needs to be done on multiple fronts.
For a long time, she managed her bold and complex strategic plan for the organization in her head. But that approach had limits in terms of communicating and deploying the strategy. I worked with her to listen, understand, and synthesize her vision and ideas into a documented strategy with aligned measures and action plans. We developed tools to communicate and deploy strategy. We quickly figured out where too much effort was focused for too little reward. We engaged the Board and realigned resources. All of sudden this complex strategy was easier to communicate and understand, and use to drive performance.
My friend moved to the West Coast, and I hadn't seen her in two years. So it was exciting to get together at my favorite Sushi restaurant and catch up. Though much had changed, the original strategic framework still guided her thinking. Incredible progress had been made on many fronts, yet her focus was on what had yet to be accomplished. Using the framework we had put in place two years before, we quickly focused in on current challenges. Somehow hours passed. We left the restaurant as they turned out the lights focused, with a clear plan and renewed inspiration for the work ahead. Over the past two years I have been rewarded again and again as our clients have experienced similar insights and progress in our work together."
Marsha Kessler
Experience
Marsha brings twenty years of experience in improving processes and organizations. She is an accomplished leader in project management, strategic alignment, process improvement, and organizational improvement. Known for her skill in leading successful cross-functional change initiatives, her background in systems engineering and statistics provide strong foundation in analysis, metrics development, and systems thinking.
Key roles prior to joining MGH CPE included Director of Business Improvement at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; reporting to the COO, Marsha provided strategic change management, process improvement, and project management leadership to critical institute-wide initiatives. She led Dana-Farber's assessment against the Baldrige framework, and developed an organizational gap analysis, cross-functional process map, strategy map, and improvement recommendations to help focus improvement efforts and achieve strategic objectives. Marsha served as Internal Project Director of a successful $20 million HR/Payroll/Finance/Supply Chain ERP implementation that received "Teamwork of the Year Award." Marsha led Polaroid's Center for Excellence for Project Management, an industry acclaimed COE that applied project management methodologies to $50 million in projects, improving results. She has been a project management speaker/author at ProjectWorld, Sloan Business School, and the Project Management Institute. She has led Lean and Six Sigma initiatives that have saved tens of millions of dollars. She serves on the Board of Examiners, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Examiners (2007-09), and has been an Evaluator for MassExcellence (2005 and 2006), the Massachusetts state Baldrige program.