The slap company includes all sorts of competent people who’ll be looking after you even though you may never see them. Rest assured they are all quality-obsessed accomplishment psychotics laboring ceaselessly on your behalf.
THE EXECUTIVE TEAM
Michael Plaut
Chief Operating Officer
One of the Chiefs in our business, Michael brings 20+ years of leadership experience at some amazing early stage companies. He oversees all facets of our growing operation with an eye focused clearly on our clients, our growth and our mission. Michael’s motto around the office? “Faster!” Mind you it’s spoken with his kind soulful heart. He keeps the electricity flowing in our culture and does his part by bringing humanity to the insanity of our crazy schedules. Apart from playing surgeon, tweaking things to better run the company, his main focus and responsibility is ensuring that each and every one of our clients receives the highest level of service and that we’re delivering top-value to each of these clients. The surgeon hands will take good care of you. Promise.
Michael’s previous position titles have ranged from VP to COO to President to CEO in various companies that include Toktumi, AGIS, Vytek Wireless, Telamon and FVS Media. This breadth experience helps him to work with visionary founders to define / capture markets, build award winning services, to fuse brand and culture with an unrelenting focus on client impact and unwillingness to yield one inch on attitude and quality.
His ongoing passions reside in restoring vintage real estate, practicing three languages, 25 years of volunteer and board level participation at non-profits focused on cross-cultural communication and multilingual k-college level education. But most important to him is his long-term relationship and his darling college age daughter.
What does Michael believe in? He believes that life is too short for bad wine and bad chocolate – most of the rest is negotiable if you have the right attitude.
Glenna Patton
President of Brand Results
Glenna’s worldwide experience in branding and marketing is deep, wide and impressive. She was hired under Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd in 2008 as Vice President of Brand Strategy and Experience Design, where she was responsible for leading brand experience across HP’s entire portfolio of products and 320,000-person employee culture. During her tenure, she led the development of a new brand strategy, architecture, identity and brand marketing campaign, driving an increase of$4.4 billion in HP’s brand value and catapulting HP to the top 10 of Interbrand’s annual global brand ranking for the first time in HP history.
For nine years prior to that, Glenna was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for MTV Networks International in London, overseeing marketing and press across the world’s most widely distributed media network, spanning 100 TV channels and more than 100 digital media services for MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1 and Comedy Central brands in EMEA, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Among her accomplishments was the successful positioning of MTV Arabia across the Middle East region, the biggest launch in the company’s history, to over 200 million people.
None of this, from big IT brand development to rocking the Kasbah, matters as much to Sean, our digital marketing manager, as Glenna’s experience launching Playboy Home Video in the Czech Republic, for which she was honored for marketing creativity with the rare Crystal Rabbit award, which he desperately covets.
Glenna has a personal passion for bridging cultures through music and is a huge Pilates fan. Lucky her: she gets to combine both at slap, where she can fuse brand and culture to her heart’s content while being stretched to the ripping point by our unrelenting focus on client impact and unwillingness to yield one inch on attitude.
Nancee Yago
EVP, Business Development
For 20+ years Nancee’s offered start-ups to Fortune 1000 her wicked intellect in building and fostering long-term relationships from the front desk to the C-Suite. Ethics are her cornerstone and selling anything that is not exquisitely valuable and personally relevant is just not part of her game plan … It’s not how she rolls and that fits nicely with our company philosophy. Nancee listens, learns and proposes the right solutions to the most complex problems. If the shoe doesn’t fit, she’ll tell you so in her very straightforward Philly kinda way.
Working in industries from Information Technology to healthcare to consulting services, Nancee has built million dollar partnerships, doubling revenue year over year through territory, services and account expansions. While working at Renaissance Technologies (R.I.P.), she established a Bay Area presence, taking sales from $0 to $12M in 3 years. Not bad if you ask us.
Her passions in life are her family which includes her husband of 25 years, her two college kids down in San Diego and hiking the beautiful Shell Ridge in the East Bay hills with her French Bulldog (whose name not ironically is Snorty Pig – long story) and her Golden Retriever named Miley Mae Moose (don’t even ask). She is a voracious reader and started a book club over a dozen years ago that continues to meet monthly to drink wine and read books and drink wine.
Nancee’s core belief in life? That everyone is entitled to their own opinion as long as it is either exactly the same as hers or won’t get in her way. That says a lot about our gal.
Julia Shumelda
Senior Vice President
Facilitation
Julia is our resident specialist in neuropsychology. She has 25 years of international experience in behavioral change, organizational development and emotional intelligence. She is sweet and charming but make no eye contact with this woman. She will have your cerebral cortex sliced, diced and served with pickles before you even realizing it’s missing.
At slap, she is responsible for supervising our facilitators and they [have been programmed to] love her. When she steps out from behind the lab coat and supervisory role to personally facilitate or directly coach – whoa, baby. A stunning experience that always earns highest ratings from managers in countries around the world.
Mark Sato
Senior Vice President
Mark has over 20 years of management experience in the IT (Oracle) and healthcare (Kasier Permanente) industries. No, he didn’t have to go to the second one to recover from the first one.
He has extensive experience global management development experience and virtual facilitation design and delivery experience. At slap, he uses all of it. Mark also manages Stan’s keynote business within our company, where he uses none of this.
Mark holds an MBA from Cal State and certifications in coaching communication and performance management.
Rob Bogosian
Vice President
Rob was the Vice President of Performance Development at Wachovia when they were a financial services powerhouse and, well, when they were still around. He was responsible for organizational development initiatives throughout Wachovia’s asset management line of business and overseeing the development of executive teams and high potential talent. Prior to Wachovia, Rob was the manager of State Street Corporation’s advanced leadership development.
We let Rob continue as Professor of Management at Hult International Business School in Cambridge, which is still around and doing fine.
Consultants
Our strategic consultants have extensive experience in some of the largest consulting organizations and in positions of helming fast-growth companies. They have multiple obsessions: creating bold strategies for you and ensuring those strategies are successfully implemented.
Facilitators and Coaches
We have two categories of facilitators/coaches: Extraordinary and Dangerous. A lot of the Extraordinary slap facilitators have achieved Ph.D.s and other impressive academic qualifications—the specialist in neurobiology kind, the summa cum laude at Harvard kind and other kinds. More importantly, all have been managers with long histories of accomplishments at the level they work with or above. They know what it’s like to have revenue, strategy and headcount responsibilities because they’ve successfully managed them.
Stan Slap, who created our solutions, is theoretically available to facilitate senior management sessions—his schedule being the biggest issue. Of course, Stan isn’t really dangerous—just intense, provocative, passionate and uncompromising (read: Dangerous).
Account Management
We encourage our account managers to go native. We want them to live, breathe and advocate your business. Not that it’s a big push for them to advocate your business at slap since everybody else here feels the same way.
Keynote Management
Our keynote management staff believes in a “highest quality/lowest maintenance” ethic for our clients and their events. They have their own stirring speeches about the importance of managing details and the impossibility of managing Stan.
Project Management
Our unflappable project managers never believe anything anybody anywhere in the world tells them. They consider “No” to be someone’s way of saying “Hi.”
