Here are two takes on the book, “Electrify” by Saul Griffith. The first is a guest review by Anthony Akerman and the other is by our CEO Billy Afghan. Anthony Akerman is a logistics and shipping expert with 30 years of experience, specializing in decarbonization. He has led startups and business turnarounds across the USA, … Read more
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every ProjectBy Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner Published February 2023 Do you believe you truly understand what makes major capital projects succeed or fail? In my experience working with hundreds of project teams and leaders, whether they’ve led one project or ten, … Read more
Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us By Mark Yaconelli Can you remember a time when you heard a story so well told that it transformed the way you view the world? “Between the Listening and the Telling” by Mark Yaconelli offers a surprisingly fresh take on the art of storytelling. … Read more
How do you decide what book to read when they look and sound similar? This month, I am considering three excellent books that address our dramatically changing world. Yet, each offers a fresh perspective and unique approach that will appeal to a diverse audience. Here is a useful guide to help sort out your limited … Read more
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson Published April 2020 One of my sustainability and culture colleagues, Heather Matthews, and I took on this book together to explore what reimagining capitalism would mean for leadership and culture in global organizations. This book delivered clear, inspiring, and well researched answers for us. We … Read more
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder Published January 2023 How often do you find yourself walking past a homeless person in your city and wonder how this person got there, how they manage to survive there, and worse yet, why do there seem to be … Read more
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter What physical endeavor would you choose to take on, knowing you only had a 50/50 chance of accomplishing it? This ’50/50′ practice is one of many physical endurance practices suggested at the onset of “The Comfort Crisis” by Michael Easter. … Read more
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks Published April 2019 How do you define success for yourself? For your children? Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, by David Brooks, comes at a time when we should all be asking ourselves this question newly. This book examines what it … Read more
By Amanda Ripley Published April 2021 What role does humiliation and other deeply felt emotions play in escalating conflict? Amanda Ripley’s thought-provoking book, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out,” delves into the roots of deep-seated conflicts, dissecting their causes and offering insightful strategies for breaking free from the clutches of … Read more
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas By David Bornstein Originally Published 2007, new foreword by author in May 2020 Is it possible to have a “formula” for taking on seemingly intractable social challenges and not only transforming them, but also scaling them to create lasting sustainable change? In his … Read more
Billy Afghan is the co-founder of Genii Earth, a consulting firm serving global businesses and non-profit leaders seeking to address the earth-sized challenges confronting their organizations. Billy has been designing and leading consulting engagements with enterprise-level organizations for over 30 years.
Billy is appreciated by her clients for her direct style and perceptive insights for revealing what’s not being seen or said. Billy galvanizes commitment and moves individuals and teams toward coordinated action for a common purpose. She welcomes big, bold challenges and delivers transformative outcomes for her clients and their organizations.
Billy was the managing director for the largest and most profitable region in a global consulting firm for 13 years. She assumed the role of CEO at Genii Earth in 2021, and has built a global community of dedicated and highly experienced coaches and consultants.
A Portland, Oregon native, she has traveled and worked in more than 50 countries and in many industries around the globe, including high-tech, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceutical, bio-tech, chemical, aviation and multi-stakeholder major and mega capital projects. Billy is valued for her skills in coaching executives, developing leadership capacities for cross functional teams, and enabling people-first cultures. Billy’s family is also global -- In addition to Americans, Billy’s family includes Iranians, Kenyans and Italians.
Billy graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Western Oregon University and has a master’s degree in business administration from Portland State University. She holds certifications in Climate Change Leadership from Cornell University, the Leadership Circle Profile 360, the Enneagram Assessment and completed training at the London-based School of Coaching. Billy has served as an adjunct faculty member at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Texas, lecturing on leadership, organizational and project culture, and industrial ergonomic design.
Billy is committed to life-long learning for herself and for her clients. She is an avid reader of non-fiction and publishes monthly reviews on books and articles of current urgent interest in and for the world. She is also a Moth Storytelling GrandSlam Champion and can been seen telling personal stories on stage in various venues in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Billy also learns important lessons about the planet through tending to her garden.
Will Hewett is a co-founder of Genii Earth LLC and a creative, perceptive partner to leaders who are reshaping how business operates. With extensive experience guiding executives and teams across diverse industries, Will helps leaders strengthen organizational culture, enhance leadership capacity, and navigate complex challenges with insight and creativity.
While remaining a champion of Genii Earth’s mission, Will now focuses on his independent work partnering with leaders in executive coaching, organizational culture, and safety leadership.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Executive Coaching
• Executive Team Development
• Leadership Development
• Organizational Culture Transformation
• Coach and Consultant Training
Genii Earth co-founder, Joseph Friedman, has dedicated his career to mastering applied transformational education – the art of enabling people to see the world in new ways so that they can think, imagine and act as never before, causing measurable step changes in performance.
For over forty years, he has applied this method in consulting and coaching individuals and organizations in Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, India, Canada and across the United States. Joseph’s work enabled his clients to develop high-integrity operations and achieve breakthroughs in communication effectiveness, executive leadership, and teamwork resulting in measurable and meaningful performance improvement.
In addition to Genii Earth, Joseph has been a founding partner in three other successful consultancies, learning first-hand the reality of the maxim, “relationship is the foundation for accomplishment”. His experiences range from advising small businesses to developing executive teams in large organizations ; from leading organizational transformation projects in the American healthcare industry to co-developing and leading an international development program for transformative global “evolutionaries.” These experiences have left him with a lasting appreciation of the remarkable results that can happen when people’s natural genius is unleashed.
In service of a thriving global community, Joseph worked for five years co-designing and then facilitating leadership development programs for the United Nations Development Program. His work enabled men and women in Africa to mobilize individuals and organizations to respond to the growing AIDS epidemic.
Returning to the consulting industry, Joseph applied his deep knowledge of Ken Wilber's Integral Approach to lead the development of a safety culture assessment for JMJ Associates, a company he had co-founded. The Integral Safety Assessment was used primarily for energy companies and their major capital projects. The design of this unique tool enabled organizations and their project leaders to assess and address both the subjective and objective elements of safety culture and performance. He also created the company’s consultant training and development function and managed a global team of consultants to deliver its programs.
Prior to his consulting career, Joseph studied and taught history at the University of California, Berkeley and in secondary schools in the San Francisco area. As a volunteer for an international leader in human development, he lead hundreds of communication and personal growth seminars. He volunteered and then served on staff for a global NGO, The Hunger Project, where he learned and practiced the arts of rigorous management, influencing without authority and transformational fundraising.
Joseph is certified in using The Leadership Circle 360 assessment and Hellinger Constellation work. He graduated cum laude from Oberlin College and holds a Masters in Arts and Candidate in Philosophy in European History from the University of California, Berkeley. He has studied many transformational and spiritual disciplines and is an associate author of The Resonance Code;: Empowering Leaders to Evolve Toward Wholeness .
Joseph is married and lives in Santa Fe, NM with his wife, Marilyn, where he is often visited by his three grown children.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Visioning & Transitioning
• Cross-Sector Collaborations
• High-Stakes Conversations
• Cultural and Social Change
• Leadership Development
Susan Harycki is a Genii Earth co-founder with a path of mastery that includes evoking, designing, and facilitating conversations that matter. Susan enables people to articulate a desired future, act in shared purpose, and generate multi-stakeholder benefit across belief systems, languages, cultures, and organizations. She has coached, consulted, and convened conversations on four continents, as well as being a leader responsible for the development of others and the delivery of transformational business results.
Susan’s work has been one of ever-increasing significance and scale.
The foundational work in her early career included: teaching behavioral science at the secondary level, serving as program director for a 16-county health-education program, delivering life planning seminars, and being a program director for a state-wide non-profit working to strengthen families and stop child abuse. She also provided coaching and consulting to professionals, small businesses, and city government agencies. Her volunteer work included suicide prevention/crisis intervention hotlines and life skills development in Texas prisons.
It was during this formative part of her work life that she discovered in a very felt way that we are each victim and perpetrator, vulnerable and strong, problem and solution—and that we need each other to break the cycles of harm present in our society and create what’s needed in the world.
In 2005, Susan joined a global transformational consultancy and expanded her work to include development of leaders and their teams in large global organizations and major capital projects. Whether in boots or boardrooms, Susan experienced firsthand the power of conversations to bring businesses with this kind of reach into the upstream work for systems change and a world that works. The leadership capacities, cultures, and systems businesses develop enable them to deliver unprecedented business results while also changing lives and contributing to the world around them.
For Susan, like many others, the stakes have never been higher for people and our planet. The co-founding of Genii Earth in 2021 is a call for leaders across all sectors to expand the context and conversation in their places of work to include generating business results in ways that serve life and bring solutions to the Earth-sized challenges we face today. Under Susan’s leadership, Genii’s Futuring conversations enable people to get to the heart of the matter, expand their capacity to hold what appear to be competing truths or commitments, engage in shared meaning-making, gain lines of sight to highest possibilities, and give rise to collective wisdom and action.
Susan holds certifications in Executive Coaching from Corporate Coach U & Myles Downey School of Coaching, and she is a certified Leadership Circle 360 Assessments coach. Susan graduated Magna cum Laude from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a BS degree and has completed graduate studies in organizational psychology. She has published parenting, life skills, sexuality education, and stress management curricula.
Susan lives on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin with her husband, Dave. She delights in being in nature, stewarding the land, and sharing their home and access to the Apostle Islands National Seashore with their children, grandchildren, and friends.
Practice Focus:
As Director of Safety Culture & Project Readiness at Genii Earth, Elyse leads the firm’s practice in preparing teams, projects, and organizations to operate at peak performance under high-stakes conditions. She partners with executive teams, project leaders, and operational stakeholders to align strategy, leadership, and human performance—ensuring work is delivered safely, on schedule, and to the highest standard of operational excellence.
Elyse brings decades of experience managing risk and team performance in complex, high-consequence environments. At Whitefish Mountain Resort, she earned the National Ski Area Association’s Best Overall Safety Program Award twice for building cohesive teams that prevent and mitigate critical incidents.
Globally, Elyse spent six years at Chevron in senior safety roles supporting high-risk offshore and onshore operations, including drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hook-up and commissioning work in Angola, Africa, and project operations in Bulgaria for Chevron’s Future Growth Project in Kazakhstan. She built and led programs in incident investigation, contractor safety management, occupational hygiene, and cross-functional risk mitigation, ensuring operational teams could execute safely and efficiently across multiple countries and regulatory environments. Her work at Chevron earned her the 2018 GRIT Award from ALLY Energy for outstanding safety leadership and engagement.
A Certified Safety Professional (BCSP) and former professional figure skater, coach, and choreographer, Elyse combines precision, discipline, and creativity in designing programs that strengthen team alignment, readiness, and resilience. She works closely with clients and consulting teams to ensure complex projects operate smoothly, safely, and efficiently—turning potential risk into reliable performance.
When not leading Genii Earth’s practice, Elyse is either skating with members of her community or traveling with her husband, Filip, and their daughter, Ebba, sharing global experiences and perspectives that inform her work in leadership and human performance.
PRACTICE FOCUS
• Customer Relations
• Communications
• Market & Business Planning
“My greatest joy is building relationships and helping people and organizations find encouragement and impact. I love being a part of Genii’s purpose-driven work in the world, communicating all that is and all that can be for people and our planet.”
Laurie leads Genii’s marketing and communications. She has spent her career in business development and marketing for global professional services firms. Her work has included developing strategic growth plans, creating brand messaging, and designing sales and communications initiatives focused on the customer experience.
Developing long-term, trusted relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, and team members has been integral to her success. Over the years, she has supported global energy, construction, and manufacturing organizations, as well as mid-sized mission-driven companies seeking triple bottom-line growth – prioritizing people, planet, and profit.
Laurie also owns a small consulting firm, advising early-stage businesses. In prior roles, Laurie served as the Chief Marketing Officer for a global consulting firm, the President of a privately-held firm specializing in the turnaround of distressed organizations, and the Senior Vice President of Global Client Services at ESI International (now KornFerry), where she was responsible for client sales and operations. She began her career at AT&T as a District Manager for mid-market commercial clients in Washington, DC.
An alumna of The George Washington University, Laurie earned a Master of Business Administration in Marketing and a Master's Certificate in Project Management. She graduated from The University of the South with a Bachelor of Science in Forestry & Geology. She completed Executive Education in leadership at Yale University.
Laurie cares deeply for our global community and serves as a Board member, fundraiser, and volunteer. She is on the Board of Advisors for International Renewable Energy Systems (IRES), bringing clean energy innovation to remote communities. Laurie is also on the Board of Directors of the National Presbyterian Fund for Charitable Giving and leads its development efforts. She served for over 10 years on the Washington Area Board of Advisors of ChildHelp. Laurie is a member of the Board of Directors of the ROSE Women’s Foundation, where she actively participates in building a faith-based community of women entrepreneurs in the slums of Nairobi.
Laurie lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband enjoying time spent with her two sons, and daughter-in-law. She is an avid golfer, DC sports enthusiast, and lover of the great outdoors.
Outcomes
- Understand why the leadership approaches of the past are insufficient for today and tomorrow
- Learn about the new leadership capabilities needed to bring to life net-positive ways of doing business
- Take away practices you can begin using immediately
Agenda
- What are you committed to shifting, creating, reimagining in your work?
- Why Leadership Must Evolve
- Essential skills for Next Way leaders
- Getting into Action
Why Attend
Enliven your important and challenging work with approaches that meet these complex times. And get more return on the energy you expend.
Perfect For
Leaders and teams who are committed to a major shift in the way they work such that it works for the world.
Outcomes
- Complete a risk snapshot of your team’s norms around stepping out of their comfort zone.
- Learn about why we play it safe and why your purpose needs you to begin taking risks.
- Put into action practices to build a culture of supported risk on your team.
Agenda
What are you committed to shifting, creating, reimagining in your work?
The importance of safety and risk and how they get out of balance.
What type of risks could benefit your work?
How to get started.
Why Attend
Leverage the genius, ideas and innovation that may be currently sitting dormant in your team.
Perfect For
Leaders and teams who are committed to a major shift in the way their buisness works in the world … and who are currently playing it too safe.
Overview
Sometimes our most important work slows down or gets stuck for reasons we can’t readily see. It’s part of working in organizations. Learn the reasons why this can happen and ways to get unstuck and regain the energy and moment that your purpose-led work deserves.
Outcomes
- Gain a “balcony view” of what’s going on with your project.
- Learn the helpful lenses to look through when determining why you are stuck.
- Empower your path forward with a few key moves that will get things flowing.
Agenda
Why we get stuck in projects.
Gaining a fresh perspective on our current challenges.
What getting stuck can teach us about getting things done.
First steps to getting back on track.
Why Attend
Because the work you are up to is too important, and the potential on your team(s) is too great to stay stuck.
Perfect For
Leadership and project teams who are frustrated with how effective and productive they are.
Outcomes
- Generate a shared snapshot of your organization’s current culture.
- Learn about the power of culture to affect everything.
- Explore how your culture is supporting your purpose and how it may not be.
- Learn key principles about how to shape culture so it starts working for you.
Agenda
What is culture and why is it essential that leaders understand it?
Creating a snapshot of your culture.
What are the cultural qualities that would most support your work?
How to shape culture every day.
Why Attend
To begin making your culture one of your greatest allies to your purpose.
Perfect For
Leadership teams (early-stage to the well established) who want to start addressing cultural barriers and creating cultural norms in line with purpose and values.
Outcomes
- Learn about the importance of consciously choosing who you are being when you work on compliance.
- Assess how much your organization's purpose is alive in your compliance work.
- Understand the benefits of infusing compliance with purpose.
- Gain practical ways to elevate your compliance work every day.
Agenda
Why the way you think about compliance matters.
A look at your culture norms around compliance.
Imagining a new way to hold your compliance efforts.
How to begin leading compliance efforts with purpose.
Why Attend
To upgrade your compliance efforts to be just as impactful, rewarding and strategic as other organizational priorities.
Perfect For
Compliance leaders who are committed to elevating their work from reactive to purposeful and reaping the rewards in quality and engagement.
Sabu Joseph brings 25+ years of global expertise in safety leadership, high-performance culture, and change management across energy, power, major capital projects, and high-hazard industries.
Over a 19-year tenure with a leading international consulting organisation, Sabu led high-impact national and international engagements — delivering onsite coaching and development programmes for multicultural teams across the Middle East, Europe, and India. In 2025 he founded High Impact Consulting, bringing that depth of experience directly to clients.
His project and client credentials are extensive. Sabu has worked with some of the world's most respected energy and capital projects organisations, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Qatargas, Qatar Energy, RasGas, GASCO, BAPCO, JGC, Fluor, McDermott, Maersk Oil, and Adani — giving him rare insight into what safety leadership and culture transformation looks like at genuine scale across complex, multicultural operating environments.
Sabu's core strength is building inclusive, high-ownership cultures that allow major projects to perform safely and consistently. He works across all organisational levels — from executive coaching and leadership alignment through to frontline culture and behavioural programmes — and has a proven track record facilitating transformative workshops on safety leadership, operational excellence, and high-performance culture.
He holds a Master's in Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology, a Commonwealth Secretariat Scholarship (London), and professional training in Behaviour-Based Safety, Lean Management, Change Management, and Performance Coaching.
Soodeh (Sou) Montazeri is a researcher, strategist, and systems thinker with 15+ years of experience helping organisations translate deep human understanding into clearer product, innovation, and strategic decisions.
With a PhD in Design Science focused on social impact and a background in product design, Soodeh's work sits at the intersection of strategy, systems thinking, and human-centred design. Her early research explored how design decisions shape long-term behavioural and psychological outcomes — a lens that continues to inform everything she does.
As a research leader at Google and Microsoft, she built and scaled research programmes that shaped product direction across complex, global systems. She has since led research initiatives across startups, fintech organisations, research consultancies, and enterprise ecosystems worldwide.
In 2024 Soodeh founded ClarityWise, partnering with founders and product leaders to uncover behavioural patterns, identify opportunity spaces, and move organisations from reactive research toward intentional insight capability. Her work helps teams build the kind of human understanding that makes products — and the decisions behind them — genuinely stronger.
Douglas Mowle is a senior adviser and executive coach with over three decades of experience spanning large-scale construction management, executive leadership of major capital programs, and safety excellence. Based in London, he brings a rare combination of hands-on project delivery and board-level advisory experience that distinguishes his practice.
Douglas began his career delivering major capital projects across Europe, developing deep expertise in complex, high-value infrastructure programmes. He went on to join a global leadership consulting firm as a partner, where he led major capital project advisory across the Middle East and Asia, working with some of the world's largest energy and industrial operators.
Recognising the critical role of safety culture in project success, Douglas served as HSEQ Director at Galp Energia in Portugal, embedding safety, health, environment, and quality frameworks at the heart of a major international energy business — an executive-level operational experience that gives him a grounded credibility few advisers can match.
Today, Douglas advises and coaches senior executives at some of the world's most respected energy and infrastructure organisations, including Shell, Moeve, Ørsted, and SkyNRG. His work focuses on unlocking leadership capability, driving operational excellence, and embedding a culture of brilliant safety in complex, high-stakes environments.
Douglas Mowle is a senior adviser and executive coach with over three decades of experience spanning large-scale construction management, executive leadership of major capital programs, and safety excellence. Based in London, he brings a rare combination of hands-on project delivery and board-level advisory experience that distinguishes his practice.
Douglas began his career delivering major capital projects across Europe, developing deep expertise in complex, high-value infrastructure programmes. He went on to join a global leadership consulting firm as a partner, where he led major capital project advisory across the Middle East and Asia, working with some of the world's largest energy and industrial operators.
Recognising the critical role of safety culture in project success, Douglas served as HSEQ Director at Galp Energia in Portugal, embedding safety, health, environment, and quality frameworks at the heart of a major international energy business — an executive-level operational experience that gives him a grounded credibility few advisers can match.
Today, Douglas advises and coaches senior executives at some of the world's most respected energy and infrastructure organisations, including Shell, Moeve, Ørsted, and SkyNRG. His work focuses on unlocking leadership capability, driving operational excellence, and embedding a culture of brilliant safety in complex, high-stakes environments.
Jessica North is an engineering leader with nearly 20 years of experience delivering complex power infrastructure projects. She has worked alongside utilities and multidisciplinary engineering teams responsible for planning, designing, and executing critical grid investments. Today, Jessica focuses on strengthening the operational systems that support infrastructure delivery while championing the human side of engineering—helping organizations build cultures with the clarity, trust, and transparency people need to learn, grow, and do their best work on the projects that keep our communities powered. She is also the co-founder of EverNorth Solutions.
Chip Richards is a globally sought-after leadership coach and facilitator with nearly 30 years of experience helping leaders and teams navigate complexity and deliver extraordinary outcomes on major capital projects.
Originally from Colorado and based in Australia since 1994, Chip has led full-scale leadership engagements across major projects in Australia, Japan, China, Italy, and Canada. His work spans founders and C-suite executives through to project leadership teams — focusing on the alignment, clarity, and high-performance culture that complex projects demand.
Chip's background is unconventional and instructive. A former elite athlete whose Olympic path was redirected by injury, he became Head Coach of the Australian Olympic Ski Team, mentoring medalists and world champions from four nations. Over the past 20+ years he has brought those same high-performance principles into the capital projects world, working with more than 200,000 people across industries and leadership levels.
His project credentials include a JMJ "Making the Impossible Possible" Award for his safety culture work on the Ichthys LNG mega-project — one of the most complex energy developments in Australian history. Beyond projects, Chip has worked with global organisations including Google, Baker Hughes, Lend Lease, and JGC.
What sponsors and project directors consistently value is Chip's ability to help leadership teams see beyond their current constraints, move from misalignment to shared purpose, and build the confidence to execute ambitious visions together — calmly, clearly, and fast.
Natalie Smith is a senior advisor and executive coach with 25+ years of experience helping major capital projects start strong, deliver on time, and finish safely.
Working across energy, power, and infrastructure projects in 15+ countries — including three landmark mega-projects with workforces of up to 50,000 people — Natalie specialises in the leadership alignment and culture work that separates projects that struggle from those that succeed. Her clients include C-suite executives, project sponsors, and the management teams responsible for turning large investments into operational results.
Natalie's work addresses the human factors that most often derail major projects: misaligned leadership, fragmented teams, and safety cultures that exist on paper but not in practice. She co-designs executive alignment programmes, builds high-performance cross-functional teams from siloed expert groups, and serves as a trusted neutral facilitator when competing stakeholders need to reach workable agreements fast.
Her safety culture work is grounded in Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) methodology and goes well beyond compliance — helping leaders at every level internalise safety as a personal commitment, and building the behavioural patterns that allow complex projects to deliver without harm.
The result: projects with clearer direction, stronger teams, and the leadership culture to protect both people and investment.