Kristin Cobble
Co-founder
Clients have called Kristin many things: an organizational development guru, insightful, compassionate, transformational. We call her inspiring. With over 20 years of experience in helping leadership teams, organizations, and multi-stakeholder groups realize their potential, she nurtures courage in others to think bigger about what’s possible, then make it a reality.
Kristin’s ability to provide clear feedback is one of her greatest gifts. It’s why groups she facilitates come alive and why leadership teams love working with her. She believes the challenges we face as a species will require new ways of thinking and working together across disciplines, values, and both visible and invisible barriers.
Kristin enjoys walking her son to school up and down the steep hills of San Francisco and spending as much time in nature as she can. While she’s passionate about her work, she never lets it interfere with March Madness… especially when the Jayhawks are playing.
Highlights:
- Expertise in systems thinking, scenario planning, conflict and coaching, and the work of David Kantor
- Guest lecturer at the Haas School of Business and the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program
- Certified New Ventures West coach
- B.A. from Wellesley College. Also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science
- Past clients include: Genentech, Amyris, Hewlett-Packard, Clorox, Inter-American Development Bank, Gap, UNAIDS
You can reach Kristin via email at kristin@groupaya.net. You can follow her thoughts on our blog, on her personal blog, and on Twitter at @KristinCobble.
Eugene Eric Kim
Co-founder
Eugene hates the idea of putting people into boxes, which is good, because we can’t put him in one. He has worked as a writer and an editor, a researcher and an analyst, and a programmer and a manager. In 2002, he decided to bring all of these skills and interests to bear on his true passion: collaboration for social good.
As the founder of Blue Oxen Associates, Eugene developed a reputation for designing and facilitating great collaborative experiences and for catalyzing collaboration in large networks, all while melding the best of digital with face-to-face technologies. He believes that groups are smarter than individuals and that tools should serve people, not the other way around.
When Eugene speaks, people listen. Sometimes he shares an insight, more often he raises an essential question, always he helps groups get clear. While he strives to bring greater harmony to the world, he roots against all Boston sports teams.
Highlights:
- Experienced in strategy and large-scale, participatory design (both face-to-face and digital)
- Thought leader in collaborative tools, especially wikis, digital identity, user experience, and open source
- Led computer pioneer Doug Engelbart’s research project on next-generation knowledge systems
- A.B. from Harvard University in History and Science
- Past clients include: Wikimedia Foundation, NASA, International Institute of Education, Digital Persona, World Economic Forum
You can reach Eugene via email at eekim@groupaya.net. You can follow his thoughts on our blog, on his personal blog, and on Twitter at @eekim.
Rebecca Petzel
Community Catalyst
Rebecca is literally crazy about collaboration, always seeking bigger and better ways for people to work together. Her adventures and explorations have taken her across the globe, from orderly Sweden to wild Wyoming, investigating how collaborative innovation communities can fuel social and environmental change.
She received her B.A. from the great University of Wisconsin (go Badgers!) and her M.S. in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. She’s spent the past five years helping clients harness their collective wisdom toward solving environmental and social challenges.
Rebecca lights up the room with her warmth, optimism, and insights. But don’t let her Midwestern pragmatism fool you. Rebecca is all about out-performing and supplanting old institutional paradigms in an effort to save the world. When she’s not working at her computer, she’s outdoors, enjoying some old-fashioned fun, especially the peak-bagging, snow-sliding kind.
You can reach Rebecca via email at rebecca@groupaya.net. You can follow her thoughts on our blog, on her personal blog, and on Twitter at @rapetzel.
Amy Wu
Designer
Amy is a writer, editor, and designer with more than 15 years of experience working with words and design. She constantly delights us as well as her clients and partners with inspired design and insightful words. She provides a full range of editorial and design services, from writing and content development to design, production, and graphic recording.
When she’s not improving our words and making us look good, Amy serves as the managing editor of poetryflash.org, a Berkeley-based literary arts organization. Her accolades are many, but she notably read with Gary Snyder in Intersection for the Arts’ Literary Series in 2003 and received her B.A. in English from UC Davis.
Amy is a doodler, scribbler, and sometimes poet. She’s a child of the world: born in Buffalo, NY, first words and steps in Taiwan, raised in Fremont, California, and now resides in San Francisco (although in the winter you’d be smart to search for her up in Tahoe). She survives the foggy San Francisco summers with a healthy dose of running, hiking, and rock climbing.
You can reach Amy via email at amy@groupaya.net. You can follow her thoughts on her personal website.
Betty Marcon
Business Manager
No team is complete without a historian / pastry chef / restaurateur / bookkeeper. Fortunately, we’ve got Betty. She manages our finances and helps us maintain a thriving business. From 2003 to 2008, she and her husband owned and operated Mistral Rotisserie. Since then, she’s been sharing her years of experience as an entrepreneur with other businesses, supporting their operations and helping them grow and thrive.
Betty approaches our finances with the same creativity and entrepreneurial spirit she brought to nourishing hungry people during the first half of her career. When she’s not tending to our books (or our stomachs), you can find her at Off the Grid (she happens to be a food truck connoisseur), enjoying the Three Babes Bakeshop, or kayaking off the calories. At the end of the day, what matters to her most is her community: her family, the Jewish spiritual community, and her friends in her hometown of San Francisco.
You can reach Betty via email at betty@groupaya.net.