Although our associates have academic credentials from top business schools and real-world experience with Fortune 500 companies—as well as a few start-ups—they also have what we call Zero-Gravity Thinker characteristics.  

 They have psychological distance from the effort (they don´t report to or plan to work long-term with anyone on the team) which enables them to help team members challenge existing mindsets and assumptions.  

They have renaissance tendencies (a passion for learning and a propensity for creating new concepts, inventions and ideas) which helps fuel the team´s imagination.  

And, they and/or the advisors who join them to work with a client, have related expertise (expertise in an area that is adjacent to, but not precisely the same as the expertise of those on the client team) enabling them to add insights and ideas from both a naive point of view and that of an expert from a different field.

Research shows that Zero-Gravity Thinkers stimulate innovative or what we call ‘Zero-Gravity´ thinking.  And it is this kind of thinking that leads to the breakthrough insights and innovations that are the foundation for growth.

Zero-Gravity Thinkers and Zero-Gravity Thinking are discussed in detail in the book by Zero-G founder, Cynthia Barton Rabe.

Cynthia Barton Rabe  has 20 years of experience in senior business and marketing management roles for consumer product and technology companies. Most recently she held the position of Innovation Strategist for Intel Corporation until early 2006 when she founded Zero-G, LLC.  She is also the author of ‘The Innovation Killer; How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It´ to be released by AMACOM (American Management Association´s publishing group) June, 2006.

Prior to her role as Innovation Strategist with Intel Cindy was the Director of Consumer Marketing for Intel´s first consumer home networking product line, AnyPoint Home Network. She also acted as an advisor to ‘intrepreneurs´ within the company´s new business group, providing guidance on business and marketing strategy in order to help engineers harvest value from their technology breakthroughs.

Before joining Intel Cindy managed consumer product businesses for the Ralston Purina and Eveready Battery Companies where she had profit/loss responsibilities for Purina Premium Cat Food, Eveready Flashlights, Eveready Lighting Toys and Energizer Batteries. An interesting sidebar is that while she was with the Eveready Battery Company, she was one of the 4-person product management team that originally introduced the “Energizer Bunny’ advertising campaign (1988).   Cindy has also provided strategic consulting services to a wide variety of organizations including the Armand Hammer Art Museum, Apple, Chart House Restaurants and several start-up ventures.

Cindy is an avid student of innovation, strategy and creativity with a focus on translating theory into concepts that can be applied in the real-world. Her undergraduate degree is from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri  and she also attended the Stanford University Executive Institute for Management as Intel´s only sponsored employee in 1998.  She is a frequent speaker on the topic of innovation and has been a guest lecturer at University of Michigan and served as a judge in the Oregon Graduate Institute´s  Capstone Business Plan program for new ventures.   Her hobbies include composing music, learning to speak French, walking her golden retriever, and reading about ‘anything and everything´.

Kathy Long Holland is a specialist in the development and launching of new products and strategies. She was an executive at Nike for 7 years as the Divisional Head of New Products and Markets. She has run her own business advisory firm, LongSherpa Design, specializing in new businesses and business transitions since 1987. Her work is targeted to helping owners, executives, and managers develop strategies for dealing with transition. These transitions are related to growth, market change, ownership change, and management change.

Kathy has worked extensively with small and medium sized businesses, start-up entrepreneurs, cooperatives, corporate environments and not-for-profit organizations. She co-founded ECO-D/OMBI, a not-for-profit publicly funded corporation providing business development and advisory services to innovative enterprises in the start-up and early stages of their development.

She is an expert in entrepreneurship and has lectured at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, The School for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Lecturer at the University of Oregon Graduate School of Business and Oregon Health Sciences University. Most recently, she has presented leadership and entrepreneurship training for the U. S. State Department in the Middle East. Kathy also serves on numerous Boards of Directors, both for profit and non-profit. Her interests include hiking in the great outdoors, reading, gardening, travel, photography and participating in organizations targeting issues of rural poverty, sustainable food systems, women, youth and education. She also enjoys spending time with her family, friends, and two cats.

Barry Bonder is a hands-on business and marketing executive with a track record of innovation in environments ranging from small entrepreneurial ventures to a Fortune 50 company.  Barry has extensive expertise in business-to-business marketing, consumer marketing, new product development, product line management and business reorganization, and is skilled in a broad array of disciplines including business law, human resources and public relations.

Barry has over twenty years experience in high technology, where he has held a variety of management positions in both Marketing and Engineering.  These include Director of Residential Networking Products at Intel Corporation, where he had P&L responsibility for Intel´s award-winning home networking and residential gateway products, and directed Marketing, Customer Support, Manufacturing, Strategic Planning and Finance staffs.
Prior to Intel, Barry was Vice President/General Manager at In-Touch Management Systems, Inc., which during his tenure grew from start-up to a profitable provider of market-leading software to radio-paging companies in twelve countries.  At In-Touch Barry managed all day-to-day operations including Product Development, Worldwide Installation, 24/7 Customer Support and Marketing.

Barry holds an M.B.A. in General Management from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Brandeis University.  Not one to sit idle for too long, during a recent sabbatical Barry opened the Northwest´s first Nestle Toll House Café, a fresh-baked cookie and ice cream retail franchise.  When he is not working on challenging business and marketing issues, Barry enjoys home improvement projects and spending time with his wife and three sons.

Mark Paul helps companies attract more customers. He has over twenty-five years of executive level leadership experience. This includes 11 years at Global 500 companies and 17 years of leadership and management consulting as the president at Phoenix Management, Inc., and most recently as a partner at Synergy Consulting Group, LLC, an interim executive/business development consultancy. Mark has helped over 100 corporate clients grow their company value. His leadership, advice and counsel have generated over $120 million in revenue, funding and/or acquisitions.

Prior to consulting, Mark spent eleven years at Ford and Northrop Corporations; where he was an "intrapreneur" - building a $50 million business unit in two years, and leading 250 people in line and project roles. Mr. Paul holds US Patent # 4,631,583, a degree in Physics from the University of California, Irvine, and performed post-graduate studies in technology & management at the California Institute of Technology and California State University, Fullerton. Mark has served on boards of directors and advisors for various technology-based companies, and published The Entrepreneur's Survival Guide (2nd edition) and How to Survive & Thrive in Challenging Times, an audio CD. His passions include renewable energy, international business, and bringing technology to market (improving quality-of-life for everyone). When not helping companies, Mark writes music and plays guitar.