Vice-President, Business Development

Overview of Professional Career

Before  joining Distinctions, Ken Lichtenstein founded his own consulting practice, specializing in Leadership Development, Team and Organizational Effectiveness, Management and Executive Coaching, and Individual Coaching following more than 25 years of experience delivering those services to employees and executives of some of the most sophisticated corporations in the country.

Prior to establishing his practice he served as Director of Organizational Effectiveness for Allstate Insurance Company, where he managed a staff of eleven professionals responsible for designing, developing and implementing a job clarification and competency assessment process and for development of leadership strategies for 2000 of the Company’s Information Technology professionals.

Prior to his work with Allstate he was a consultant with Philadelphia based High Performance Consulting, a boutique firm specialized in performance and productivity improvement in Fortune 100 corporations. While with High Performance he worked both as an individual contributor and engagement manager on assignments that included large systems implementations and programs designed to induce unprecedented revenue growth while coaching individual executives and teams to achieve personal and business paradigm breakthroughs.

During the 80s and 90s Ken held positions as Manager or Director of Leadership and Executive Development at Fortune 500 companies including St. Louis-based Monsanto, Chicago-based Ameritech and Fairfield, CT-based General Electric. In all of those capacities he was responsible for the design, development and delivery of executive and managerial assessment and coaching programs, culture change initiatives and training/skills development curricula.

While at General Electric he was closely involved in the implementation of Jack Welch’s Change Acceleration Process (CAP) and Work Out Empowerment Model, both of which have become models for transformation in corporate America. He was also responsible for designing and implementing one of the Company’s competency-based development process, which was part of GE-wide mandate to assure optimum process as well as outstanding business outcomes.

Ken has earned a MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a MSS in Clinical Social Work from Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA and a BS degree in Psychology from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. He has also completed advanced coursework in the areas of Organizational Development and Human Resources at New York’s Columbia University.

Ken has a powerful blend of educational and direct corporate experience that enable him to deliver highly effective growth interventions, strategic transformations, and collaborative initiatives, through consulting, program creation and delivery, and coaching services.