Kris Rosenberg
Kris came along mid life. Aside from the romance, as important as it was, she
opened yet another whole world to my vision. I shall never forget how she sat
down with an adult Sunday school group and moderated the group into a new and
exciting open conversation unique for its time and place. I knew those people.
They had never communicated like that.
Kris was and is a teacher/mentor first. Like my other mentors, she
learned her craft and its insights by practicing the art as a child
psychologist and psychotherapist. She taught me how the psyche can
be distorted to the detriment of its owner. In the context of her
unconditional regard and acceptance of my being, I was able to realize
how this or that hang-up were self defeating even though they were
healthy means of coping in the beginning. These realizations too,
lie beneath our philosophy of management discussed in these pages.
Kris is also into drama—real life drama. She can make the
mundane fascinating. Simplicity is her secret. Simple words, simply
said can reduce complex theory to ho-hum practice. Well not ho hum
practice, as you will see in these pages. Like my other mentors,
she was/is ahead of her time.
Kris initiated the Returning Women Program at La Roche College and
served as the program's first director and actively administered
it for some years. Using innovative management techniques, she turned
a group of student interns managing the returning women's program
office into a well-oiled organization.
Kris belongs up there at the top of the heap. Without her,
The ALTA Group would never have happened as it did. In 1985,
The ALTA Group was formed. For seven years, sales grew at an annual
rate of 76%. Profits grew at 176% per annum. I became one of the
principles, thanks in part to her courage and faith in me. We mortgaged
everything but our souls. Early on she devised psychometric means
for evaluating a new hire's fitness for a particular job.
Kris also has affected a few thousand people directly with her inspirational
teaching, not to mention clinical work. She teaches what
she has learned to be true in her clinical psychology practice. A
decade later a former student will come call and tell her what they
learned from her finally reached print under the name of another—one
of her greatest satisfactions. She wrote a book, "Talk
To Me", Putnam. Now out of print, it appeared in five languages.
Unlike the command-and-control management systems, Kris begins with
our psyche, in its three dimensions of conscious, rational and childlike
selves, to construct a relational management system based on such
things as dignity and integrity of the individual. "Talk To
Me" provides methods for making human based management systems
workable.
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