Ann Hollier’s specialty is working with high potential business leaders and their teams to achieve peak performance, typically while driving change. Her approach is based on three principles:

First, identifying your natural style, talents, and calling, and creating strategies for a work environment supporting peak performance specifically for you. Click here to read more about High Performance Coaching.

Second, pushing and assisting you to use every tool available for information-based business strategy and decision making. Click here to read more about working with data.

Third, helping you recognize the intuitive and introspective channels that work for you. When you have to make a decision based on imperfect information, you have methods you can trust will lead you in the right direction. Click here to read more about working beyond data.

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Performance Coaching

Everyone has a distinctive natural temperament and talents that define a “sweet spot.” Here, excellence may require working hard but doesn’t feel like hard work. Ann works with her clients to define their natural style and the calling they are moving toward. They create a work environment that best supports them. She also helps leaders develop group and personalized strategies to elicit peak productivity from each team member in a sustainable way.

The following are discussions of some of the practices she applies, which have been valuable to clients ranging from senior executives of Fortune 500s to entrepreneurs driving startups.

What You Need to Perform at Your Peak.

This paper discusses key Internet trends that are changing the way we do business, and a High Performance Model that drives effective collaboration and peak productivity in an increasingly virtual world. One key to peak performance is working in synch with your natural talents and needs. This paper introduces the I.D. System, a highly effective tool for uncovering your natural style and deep motivators. These in turn determine best practices supporting peak performance specifically for you.

The Three Keys to Peak Performance.

This paper explores the connection between peak performance and calling. The three keys to peak performance are conceptually very simple - but the work of a lifetime to implement. Ann outlines four practices she uses with clients - and in her own life - that have significant value in moving us forward toward the realization of peak performance in the life that we would like to have.

 

Online Panel Discussion: Careers in Higher Education Consulting.

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion hosted by The Versatile PhD. VPhD is an online community of humanities and social science Ph.D.'s and graduate students exploring options for non-academic careers. While Ann and the other panelists all speak from their experiences as consultants to leadership in higher education, almost everything they have to say is relevant for you if you have ever considered leaving your office job to become a consultant. From writing your resume, to interviewing, to what to expect from a typical day, these panelists tell it like it is.

 

Working with Data

Ann’s background is in market research, and information-based marketing and management consulting. She has a Ph.D. in psychological research and 20 years of experience as a senior business executive. Part of her coaching philosophy is to challenge business leaders to use every tool at their disposal for information-based business strategy and decision making.

She has worked with senior management teams of Fortune 500s, and provided key insights to the campaign teams that put two presidents in the white house. She brings that mindset and business knowledge to her executive coaching. Senior management teams of global corporations, individual executives, and entrepreneurs find it equally valuable.

The following are examples of work that make her a sought-after authority in marketing communications and strategic positioning:

Advertising Research in The 21st Century.

As online market research came of age, Ann was founding Senior Research Officer for a dot.com startup, taking video testing and focus group discussions online. The approach was so revolutionary that it won both technology and process patents, eventually becoming a Harvard Business School case study. She presented results with one of her clients, Lycos, discussing research and strategic consulting that helped reposition Lycos from an Internet search engine to an online destination portal. Within 2 years Lycos became the most visited online destination worldwide. Soon after, it sold to Terra Networks for $5.4 billion. Reproduced from ESOMAR Latin American Marketing Research Conference and Exhibition: New Economy, New Marketing, New Research. Mexico City, 6-8 May 2001, with permission. Copyright ESOMAR.

 

The Waste in Advertising is the Part that Works.

Co-authored with Tim Ambler, Senior Fellow at the London Business School,  this paper demonstrates that we have a hardwired tendency to favor extravagant advertising, and to infer that brands using it must be higher in quality. Testing a model called handicap theory, the study uses online advertising research and sophisticated multivariate models to argue that the forces driving companies to spend millions on a 30 second Superbowl ad are similar to those resulting in extravagant plumage on male peacocks. Reproduced from Journal of Advertising Research, vol. 44 no. 4, Dec. 2004, pp. 375-389, with permission. Copyright WARC.

Working Beyond Data

Few top executives get where they are without a finely honed sense of intuition. They trust their gut. Ann works with clients to find and develop the introspective channels that work best for them. In her case, this information often arrives in dreams.

In addition to research-based business consulting, Ann Hollier has worked her entire adult life with dreams, images, and symbols as a language our deep Self uses to communicate with us directly, bypassing the ego. This direct channel makes them ideal tools for practical problem solving and creative work. Unlike dream interpretation, Ann’s approach does not emphasize “understanding” the dream or symbol per se. At least, not at first.

Rather, she knows from experience that the power of the image comes from its ability to move through us, to enter into our daily life as writing, music, artwork, movement, and solutions to practical problems. There, it becomes an ongoing meditation, not a conclusion. Understanding is important, but it comes at the end of this process, not the beginning.

Read on to sample some of Ann’s writing and other work describing and illustrating this process:

Cultivating Your Dream Garden.

Dreams are a perennial source of inspiration for creative work and practical problem solving. In this chapter from Dream On! A Dream Interpretation and Exploration Guide for Women, Ann and her two coauthors, Phyllis Koch-Sheras and Brooke Jones, explore both historical examples and contemporary case studies of the role dreams can play in the creative process.

 

Perfect Belize.

Perfect Belize is an excerpt from Ann's upcoming book, Might as Well Say Yes. This memoir, part travelog, part spiritual journey, shows how practicing gratitude, staying focused in the present moment, and paying attention to dreams, symbols, and synchronicities can support a deep inquiry into who we are meant to become. This process is not always about answers, but about receiving confirmation that we are asking the right questions.

 

A Message for Marnie Putnam.

A Message for Marnie Putnam is an excerpt from Ann's upcoming book, Might As Well Say Yes, and a sequel to Perfect Belize. In it, Ann continues her autobiographical exploration of dreams, images and waking life experiences that have the power to completely rearrange our understanding of what is real, and what is possible.

 

Dream House.

Dream House is an excerpt from Ann's upcoming book, Might As Well Say Yes, and a sequel to A Message for Marnie Putnam. This is an exploration of how a particular symbol changes over time, reflecting inner evolution. It also illustrates the process Ann employs of working with an image in waking life. This inquiry creates a dialogue leading to a much deeper understanding, and creates a fulcrum for change.