Michael Bungay Stanier & Box of Crayons

Michael is the Principal of Box of Crayons.

Box of Crayons helps organizations and people shift from doing Good Work to doing Great Work.

Box of Crayons uses a range of tools and techniques - leadership coaching skills, creative and strategic facilitation, and coaching programs - to ensure leaders and magaers are clear about the work that matters, are courageous about doing that work, and are not wasting time on work that doesn't matter.

Michael was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and holds an M Phil from Oxford, and a law degree and a BA with highest honors from the Australian National University. He is the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year, and is a certified coach.

Prior to founding Box of Crayons, Michael held senior positions in the agency, consulting and corporate worlds. He has worked in the UK, the United States and in Canada and across a wide range of sectors with blue-chip firms: professional service firms (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner), hi-tech (Microsoft; Xerox), financial (Royal Bank of Canada), consumer goods (Guinness, Kraft, Nestle,) and pharmaceutical (AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer).

Consulting assignments have included

o Change management (for instance, writing the global vision for GlaxoSmithKline; supporting AstraZeneca’s merger with change and internal communications programs)

o Brand-driven change (for instance, helping PricewaterhouseCoopers recreate their graduate recruitment program)

o Team effectiveness (for instance, facilitating global cross-cultural teams in AstraZeneca to become clear on what they’re doing and to clean up inter-personal dynamics; facilitating Xerox Europe and their agencies to create a stronger, more strategic working partnership)

o Innovation (for instance, working with the Marketing and Sales teams of Nestle to strategically adjust their innovation portfolio; working with American Express to help drive an innovation strategy for key target markets)

Michael is also the author of Get Unstuck & Get Going…on the stuff that matters , a self-coaching program and tool that is being used to enhance coaching skills for managers within such organizations as AstraZeneca, Centrica (British Gas), Gartner and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting, says of Get Unstuck & Get Going, “It shows the impact of great design and how what is profound does not have to be obscure. Plus there is a quiet political message in it that coaching is available to all of us and is not a profession, but a way of being with each other,” while David Taylor, author of The Naked Leader, says it is “refreshing, powerful and original.”

He is also the creator of The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun, a short internet movie that's been seen by tens of thousands of people around the world.

Michael is a well-known and popular workshop leader and keynote speaker. He has lectured at universities in the UK and in Canada, and has spoken at coaching and industry conferences in North America, the Middle East and Europe. His bi-weekly newsletter is read by 13,000 people in 125 countries around the world.

Michael Bungay Stanier