COGNITIS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Coach
- Consultant
- Director
- Trainer
David Bennett is a trainer, consultant and coach, with over 25 years' experience in organisational environments. What he loves doing is help leaders and executives bring fresh thinking to the challenges they face so that they achieve better results and find more satisfaction and fulfilment in the process.
After reading economics at Exeter University, David spent 14 years in large organisations fulfilling a variety of commercial and leadership roles both in the UK and USA. During this time he became fascinated in what it takes for people to perform consistently at their best.
In 2000, he turned his attention exclusively to the field of learning & development and since then has led hundreds of training programmes in Europe, USA, Africa and Asia on topics that include leadership, coaching, productivity, conflict handling, presenting, communicating and relationship management.
In addition, he has coached executives from a range of industries and organisations. His clients include BSkyB, Swiss Re, BASF, Newton, Nominet, Allianz, Janssen-Cilag, Compass and the Rugby Football Union.
David is a practitioner in MBTI, Insight Learning, Energetic NLP and High Performance Coaching and a master practitioner in Business NLP. However, in 2012 he was fortunate enough to stumble across an understanding of how the mind works which surpassed anything he had learnt and taught before. His focus now is in sharing the Principles behind this understanding with his clients and seeing them produce extraordinary results.
In his free time he likes to keep fit by running and practicing yoga. He also enjoys getting competitive on the golf course and tennis court!
Eventually Laurence became head of OD for P&G and then head of OD and Employee Development in Digital Equipment in Boston. His 1982 organisation design for Digital's Enfield, Connecticut plant was truly exceptional and found its way into case studies, magazine articles, books and film.
John Horsley - Founder, Managing Director
John has worked at board and operations level with medium and large organisations in both executive and consulting roles for over 30 years.
The results he has achieved testify to the effectiveness of the methodologies, tools, management skills and change processes he and Cognitis co-founder Laurence Megson have developed to assist clients deliver successful change and radical performance improvement.
After leaving teaching John moved into commerce, working in sales and general management roles within the engineering components industry. In 1986 John joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he was responsible for the management of the real estate, logistics, administration and information systems necessary to support the North Region's £220+ million revenue, 1,200 employee business.
His approach to management and organisation achieved significant improvements in performance in all departments, and in particular his re-organisation of Customer Administration was cited as a case study in the IMPACT programme managed by KPMG on behalf of the National Computing Council, major corporate sponsors and the DTI.
His work also featured as an exemplary case study in The Sunday Times video series - "Quality Improvement through Team-work".
Since 1990 John has been consulting on Organisation Design and Change and he has on several occasions taken executive roles in his client companies to lead change initiatives and turnaround situations.
John's clients include Atrium, Alexander Forbes, BAe, BBC, NTL (Virgin Media), Cellnet (O2), Coca Cola Enterprises, Digital equipment Corp (HP), Film Four, ECIC, HBOS, IBM, ICI, Krupp, Lockton, Manweb, NNC, Rolls Royce Marine, Royal Mail, Vertex, Vernons Pools, W Lucy, Willis and Xchanging.
John has a passion for sharing his skills and knowledge. He has been a visiting speaker at the MBA programmes of the University of Hull and Webster University in Geneva.
John has that rare ability to think strategically while planning tactically, all the while driving towards the long-term objectives. He has a penchant for detail without allowing detail to stand in the way of progress. He is a builder, a do-er, one who thrives on making things better than they were when he first began with a project or program. I would enjoy working with him again, and would heartedly endorse him in a senior business situation.
Laurence Megson was born near Manchester, attended Manchester Grammar School and then studied law at Manchester University. He joined Procter & Gamble at what was then the largest soap plant in northern Europe in Trafford Park, Manchester.
He rose through the ranks of production management and showing talent for training and developing people, he was promoted and moved to Newcastle HQ to specialise in middle management development and to explore the blossoming field of organisation development (OD).
He quickly recognised that training was only part of the performance equation and that the work itself in large degree determined how people produced results and quality so he focused on Organisation Design.
He made rapid progress and was soon teaching a cadre of internal OD consultants as new organisations were being set up to run the new P&G plant extensions.
This led to a career defining assignment in P&G's HQ in Cincinnati in 1975. There he was chartered to consult world-wide to the rapidly growing and innovative Paper Division: to create and define the processes needed to set up each new plant's organisation and guarantee it would outperform its predecessors. Not that easy as these plants were already among the best performing in the world.
However, this he did, developing the basic theories and models of the organisation design methodologies that have become the foundation of Cognitis' work today.
Laurence became a Board member for the Centre for Effective Organisations at UCLA, produced several articles and was guest lecturer at several of Boston's universities. He also advised many Digital customers on organisation issues and by the mid eighties had advised over one hundred organisations.
He transferred to Geneva in 1985 as HR Director for Manufacturing and Engineering, later establishing the European Organisation Consulting Group and led the re-organisation of Digital's country sales forces into entrepreneurial account teams - one team for each major EMEA account.
In 1993 he left Digital to establish, with John Horsley, an OD consulting group (Organisation Insight, latterly Organisation Dynamics Consulting Group) specialising in organisation design. In 2003 he co-founded Cognitis.
Laurence is now semi-retired and lives in Sonoma County, California. John and Laurence still collaborate and are currently writing a book on Organisation Design expected to be published in 2015.