Bob Eckert

Bob Eckert is a Founding Partner and CEO at NEW & IMPROVED, a firm which enhances the innovation and productivity of the human resource through various training, facilitation and consulting services. His focus is on overcoming organizational challenges, team development, productive relationships, productive thinking and leadership development. The vision of the firm is first and foremost to "...help people lead great lives..." and collectively, NEW & IMPROVED is doing that on a global scale.

A constant learner, Bob has been involved in the business of helping people reach their highest potential in one way or another for the last thirty years. After diverting from an early planned career in medicine, he speaks and trains from a perspective enriched by a diverse background which includes: management experience in both manufacturing and retail, creation/direction of an internationally renowned health promotion program, teaching in both youth and adult criminal justice systems, work as the senior instructor in adaptive "Outward Bound" programming for incarcerated juvenile delinquents, as founding director of a county-wide drug abuse treatment and prevention system and as a national trainer in the area of neuropharmacology and addiction. Bob has been doing his work on a global scale for the last 15 years. He is a certified "Creative Problem Solving Facilitator" and a charter member of the Toronto based Facilitators Without Borders.

Leveraging his work and research in the area of Rites of Passage, Bob makes change efforts stick. The author of numerous articles and books, his most recent (co-authored with Jonathan Vehar) is "More Lightning, Less Thunder: How to Energize Innovation Teams" which looks at a model for healthy human development in the service of great personal creativity and the emotional intelligence that leads to great team membership.

Bob has a solid track record of satisfied clients in the areas of innovation, team development and facilitation of globally diverse leadership teams for companies such as Lotus Development (Asia Pacific), Novartis (Switzerland), Nordion (Canada), Pfizer (Worldwide), Adams (Central/South America) and Kraft Foods (USA).

Since 1985, Bob's personal mission statement has included the line "...facilitate great change in the world for the health of humanity..." and his work at New & Improved is his way of bringing that vision to life. To his credit as a facilitator are improvements in: chemical dependency treatment and prevention, hospital procedure, corporate IT infrastructure, welfare system reform, homelessness mitigation, domestic violence prevention, diabetes prevention, speedier development of a number of life saving pharmaceuticals, environmental protection, economic development, and educational reform. He has facilitated new product development and process improvement efforts for a wide range of Fortune 500 companies. His work also includes strategic plan facilitation and cultural improvement efforts for a wide variety of government agencies and economic development consortia.

An avid outdoorsman who's as comfortable driving a tractor on his tree farm as he is driving meetings in corporate boardrooms, Bob lives with his wife, son and daughter and produces Maple Syrup in the Northern Adirondack Mountains of New York State.