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WORK TITLE: On the Brink
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Yorktown Heights
STATE: NY
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NATIONALITY:
http://www.simonassociates.net/our-founder/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Andy Simon.
EDUCATION:Earned Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Consultant, corporate anthropologist, educator, and writer. Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ, professor of anthropology and American studies; Poughkeepsie Savings Bank, Poughkeepsie, NY, senior vice president; First National Bank of Highland, executive vice president; Simon Associates Management Consultants, principal and founder. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, visiting professor; Blue Ocean Strategy workshop presenter, 2007—; Innovation Games, facilitator and trainer, 2011—; guest speaker and workshop presenter for Vistage International, TEC, and Executive Council; has appeared on Good Morning America.
AWARDS:Recipient of numerous Addy and Aster awards for marketing and advertising campaigns.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Forbes and Businessweek; guest blogger for FierceHealthcare’s Hospital Impact and Vistage’s Executive Street.
SIDELIGHTS
Andi Simon is a consultant and corporate anthropologist. After earning her Ph.D., she worked as a professor of anthropology and American studies at New Jersey’s Ramapo College and as a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Outside of academia, Simon has held a number of senior executive positions in marketing, management, and branding for various financial services companies. These include positions as a senior vice president with Poughkeepsie Savings Bank and as an executive vice president at First National Bank of Highland. Simon eventually founded Simon Associates Management Consultants, which combines tools for managing change in business settings, anthropological observations and methodology, and the insights of ethnography to offer companies a new approach to handling the problems they face.
Simon has offered Blue Ocean Strategy workshops to business executives since 2007. She and her husband also became certified facilitators and trainers with Innovation Games. Her marketing and advertising campaigns have won several Addy and Aster awards, and her writing has appeared in Forbes, Businessweek, and consultancy blogs.
Simon published her first book, On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, in 2016. The volume uses Simon’s own experiences, in setting up and developing her consultancy business and also her numerous workshops and webinars, to help individual entrepreneurs and companies be better suited to adapting to the fast-changing global business environment. Simon employs a corporate anthropological approach to dealing with the many problems that businesses face. In her consultancy work, she begins by identifying the type of corporate culture of a given company before determining how to make appropriate changes to that culture; creating strategies for sales, branding, and marketing; and developing high-quality products and designs. Simon uses seven case studies from different companies to illustrate the ways that they approached such change and addressed problems that arose during the process. She also offers basic principles of anthropological methodology in ways applicable to those in the corporate world. In particular, she highlights aspects of the anthropologist that are most useful in the business world, such as having a keen sense for observation and being open to the possibility of failing early in the process.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly opined that “corporate anthropology is a clever hook, but there’s not enough that’s truly new in Simon’s suggestions to” differentiate her book from others written from similar angles. Writing in the Small Business Trends Web site, Charles Franklin admitted that “On the Brink has wide applicability, but it does suffer from some specificity.” Franklin suggested, however, that “if your business is struggling or just not growing, you probably need to reflect on your assumptions about the customer and the market. It is those times that On the Brink might be of service because it will open up the conversation your brain needs to have.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 30, 2016, review of On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, p. 50.
ONLINE
Simon Associates Management Consultants Web site, http://www.simonassociates.net/ (February 13, 2017), author profile.
Small Business Trends, https://smallbiztrends.com/ (August 7, 2016), Charles Franklin, review of On the Brink.
Andrea (Andi) Simon, Ph.D., principal and founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC), has over twenty years’ experience as a senior executive with financial services and healthcare institutions.
Dr. Simon’s expertise lies in helping companies and non-profit institutions develop their purpose and brand positioning, redesign their organization’s culture and improve their financial performance, using innovative and effective product development and marketing methodologies. Andi is particularly effective at understanding how customers really “see, feel and think” about a company’s products, services and customer experience, then focusing corporate leadership on those users’ and non-users’ unmet needs as a way to open new market space.
Corporate Anthropology
SAMC was formed over a decade ago to bring the insights of ethnography, the tools of managing change in diverse industries, and the observations garnered from anthropological research to help companies change. From large organizations searching for their next big idea to entrepreneurs, small and mid-size companies or start-ups seeking new growth strategies, Andi found that they all needed a way to see what was happening “next.”
On Sale Now!
“On The Brink: A Fresh Lens To Take Your Business To New Heights”
Andi Simon Book
On Sale Now!
Dr. Simon’s new book is available now. In it, she highlights seven client stories which demonstrate how corporate anthropology, Blue Ocean Strategy® and Innovation Games® helped them re-ignite growth in their organizations. These insightful, instructive case studies make corporate anthropology easy to understand and offer tools you can use to help your own company sustain its growth in changing times.
If you would like to learn more about her upcoming book and the timely lessons it contains, contact Dr. Simon at info@simonassociates.net.
Expertise
Dr. Simon’s expertise was developed in academia and in leading companies that needed to change. She has been a tenured professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey, where she produced two distance-learning TV series for Sunrise Semester on CBS TV. She was also a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching Entrepreneurship to Arts and Science Students.
Dr. Simon’s business experience includes positions as Executive Vice President at First National Bank of Highland (now a division of M&T Bank), Senior Vice President at Poughkeepsie Savings Bank, and a Senior Executive in management, marketing and branding at several financial services companies, including Citibank and NatWest Bank. She also established new marketing and branding for a number of healthcare institutions, including Montefiore Medical Center, St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center and Hurley Medical Center.
In all of her executive positions, Andi has successfully led companies to adapt to changing business and economic environments.
Blue Ocean Strategy®. Since 2007, Dr. Simon has been conducting workshops for CEO and Key Executives on Blue Ocean Strategy. Her lecture and workshop, “Change Matters: How to Open New Market Space,” has been presented over 200 times in the U.S. and Canada. Andi is a trained practitioner in Blue Ocean Strategy and has helped numerous companies discover new Blue Oceans, successfully opening up new markets with them.
Innovation Games®. In 2011, Dr. Simon and her partner/husband Andy Simon became trained facilitators and trainers in Innovation Games, serious games to spark business innovation. SAMC uses Innovation Games with clients, typically conducting between 25-30 game sessions each year. Some companies host Innovation Games on-site to help their own employees change. Others hold Innovation Games with non-customers or clients in order to include them in a creative process for constructing new products, refining marketing communications or designing new solutions.
Culture Change. So many of SAMC’s clients find themselves in need of a cultural assessment and as a result, a culture change process. Dr. Simon is qualified in using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) developed at the University of Michigan, and is an affiliated consultant with the OCAI Online organization in the Netherlands. The OCAI survey is available in twelve languages and is widely used by companies such as HP, GE, MetLife, ING and Shell.
Awards
Dr. Simon has won numerous Addy and Aster awards for her marketing and advertising campaigns. She is a well-published author with articles in Forbes, Business Week and numerous publications and online blogs. She is a guest blogger for FierceHealth Hospital Impact and Executive Street Blog.
Dr. Andrea Simon, author of “On The Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights” is a corporate anthropologist who specializes in working with the leadership of organizations that need or want to change.
Her company, Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC), applies the theories, methods, and tools of corporate anthropology and ethnographic research to businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Dr. Simon formed SAMC to help companies and organizations adapt to changing times. Her proprietary ChangeMap™ process enables companies to envision a future and then ''reverse plan'' to ensure that the vision is achievable.
Dr. Simon is a trained practitioner in Blue Ocean Strategy® and since 2007, has given over 250 CEO workshops and speeches on the topic and consulted with a wide range of clients to help them redesign their strategies, implement business change, and open new markets. 7 case studies profiling her work with a focus on hospital marketing, healthcare marketing, Blue Ocean Strategy® and Innovation Games™ are included in “On The Brink.”
She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been interviewed for The Washington Post, Business Week, and Forbes, and writes for Forbes & The Huffington Post.
A widely engaged speaker, she has conducted workshops and speeches for Vistage International, TEC, and The Executive Council and has presents keynote speeches and workshops nationally & globally. Past engagements include the National Association of Electrical Distributors, Family Firm Institute, IACC, ABIT, Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, and the Forum for Healthcare Marketing, among others.
Learn more about Corporate Anthropologist Dr. Andi Simon, her work with innovation consulting & “On The Brink” at www.andisimon.com.
On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
Publishers Weekly. 263.22 (May 30, 2016): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
Andi Simon. Greenleaf, $19.95 (184p) ISBN 978-1-62634-280-4
Another contribution to the bursting business-innovation shelves arrives from corporate anthropologist Simon. She begins by describing how she built up a thriving consultancy business, using webinars and workshops to help companies adapt to fast-changing environments. Corporate anthropology may bean unfamiliar term to most readers, but it means exactly what it sounds like: an extension of traditional anthropology to modern business settings. Simon presents her discipline as a methodology for diagnosing and changing company cultures, developing great products and design, and creating strategies for branding, marketing, and sales. She presents case studies from seven different companies, exploring how they handled crises and leadership changes. Along the way, she shows businesspeople how to apply the concepts and methods of anthropology, such as field research and "culture probes." She also makes a more general case for the qualities of anthropologists, including "always observing to see with fresh eyes" and being willing to "fail early and often." Corporate anthropology is a clever hook, but there's not enough that's truly new in Simon's suggestions to set this apart in a crowded field. (July)
On the Brink Shows How Changed Perspective Brings New Business Opportunities
Aug 7, 2016 by Charles Franklin In Business Books 0
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"On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights" is a unique approach to growth for the business who believes they've done all they can. If you need a perspective, but don't know where to look, this 20-year experienced corporate anthropologist has plenty of stories that show you where to look and how to capitalize on this perspective for business success.
Is Your Business On the Brink of Explosive Growth? Only if You Change Your Perspective
The typical image of an anthropologist usually involves something exotic. We don’t envision them working in the boardroom, but maybe we should. Anthropologists (more specifically corporate anthropologists) are skilled in providing analysis of culture.
What’s the one thing separating your business from the competition? Culture.
What is On the Brink About?
The concept behind On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights is actually quite simple: Culture is the way business gets done. Yet inside that simple statement is packed a lot of insight. Culture develops organically as a group of humans (whether they are employees or members of a tribe) accomplish goals. This culture, however, can suffer from one big downside, the “know-it-all” part of the brain.
Our brains are incredible machines, but they can be a little presumptuous. Our brains assume that we know what’s best, which is a reason that we often ignore or downplay even seemingly good new ideas. If you put even more brains together, you start getting the “We’re not that kind of company” response when you introduce new ideas or concepts.
On the Brink concerns itself with breaking out of the mindset. It isn’t easy, but it is necessary because businesses exist in a complex world. Businesses need to adapt and evolve or they won’t survive. The key to successful adaptation and evolution for a modern business is to stay focused on core operations while remaining open to new opportunities to capitalize on that core. For example, in On the Brink, a tire link company realized that they were more than “just a tire link company”. An outside observer would have caught this, but the management at that company didn’t realize the opportunity. This “blindspot” is what On the Brink is urging business owners to consider while they are planning.
In other words, if you don’t leave your mind open to new possibilities, you will always be stuck with the same old problems.
On the Brink is the work of Dr. Andrea (Andi) Simon, who has spent over 20 years serving as a corporate anthropologist. She is the founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants, a company that helps companies capitalize on business growth using anthropological studies for business.
What Was Best About On the Brink?
The best part of On the Brink is that the book provides numerous examples of how a simple shift in perspective opened new profit channels and re-energized struggling companies. One chapter of the book demonstrates how a struggling company that specializes in call center technology used the book’s concept to provide a new service. Another chapter discusses how an industrial manufacturing business did the same thing.
It’s the wide range of applicability that is the book’s greatest assets. If you wanted to see how the book’s “big idea” would work in various businesses, this book itself provides many examples.
What Could Have Been Done Differently
On the Brink has wide applicability, but it does suffer from some specificity. In other words, the book provides the basic concept stepping out of your own brain for a minute but it doesn’t show specifically the process the business owner went through to get there. Some tools are provided, but more details about the process of working with a new perspective might be helpful. Additional information on how to make this perspective an ongoing part of business operations might also be beneficial.
Why Read On the Brink?
If your business is struggling or just not growing, you probably need to reflect on your assumptions about the customer and the market. It is those times that On the Brink might be of service because it will open up the conversation your brain needs to have. On the Brink showcases how this simple switch in your brain can open your business to a whole new opportunity that you never imagined.