The Technology of People®

BREAKING: Scientists Unveil “The Technology of People®” – Humanity’s Latest Attempt to Reboot Itself Without Turning It Off and On Again

When Orion started 25 years ago, the concept of teams was the norm.  Today, there are no teams.  There are just individuals performing tasks outlined by the heirarchy.   Corporate is now focused on chasing illusions.  Today, our sole focus is on tuning and refining those groups of people that are able, willing and capable of acting as a team.  So, we have moved from tech, pharma and comm to actual sports teams that need to triumph.  This includes Formula 1 to corporate teams focused on a common cause.  Not many pass our test.

In a world where every business solution involves more cloud than a Seattle forecast and more synergy than a yoga retreat, a revolutionary concept has emerged: *The Technology of People®*. Yes, you read that right. After decades spent automating, digitizing, and generally ignoring the human element, companies are now being told that the secret to success is-brace yourself-people.

The Human Operating System: Now With Fewer Bugs (But Still No Manual)

Forget your AI, your blockchain, your quantum computing. The real disruptive tech is Sharon from accounting and Dave from HR, now rebranded as “high-energy team assets.” According to the visionaries at Orion, the next frontier in business isn’t the metaverse; it’s the break room, where “passion toward change” is brewed alongside the coffee.

Orion’s founding partners, Bob Root and Wendy Steele, have backgrounds so impressive that even LinkedIn had to add extra fields. Bob has led ten turnarounds, five startups, and once sailed in the America’s Cup, presumably because he heard there was a team involved. Wendy built teams at Coca-Cola, which means she’s personally responsible for at least 60% of your caffeine addiction. Together, they’ve cracked the code: shift doesn’t come from process change, it comes from people’s passion-which is great news, because most corporate processes are about as exciting as a tax seminar in a windowless room.

Consultants Are Out; Coaches, Facilitators, and “Doers” Are In

Orion’s approach is refreshingly simple: they don’t consult, they don’t theorize, and they definitely don’t bill by the hour for “creeping excellence.” Instead, they guide, coach, and facilitate, which is consultant-speak for “we’ll tell you what to do, but with more hugging.” Their wisdom is distilled from “real P&L responsibility,” which, for the uninitiated, is the business equivalent of having actually read the terms and conditions before clicking “I Agree”.

The Trilogy™ Program: Purpose, Function, Energy, and a Side of Fries

Orion’s secret sauce is the Trilogy™ program, which focuses on three things: Purpose, Function, and Energy. (Because if you’re going to have a business philosophy, it should sound like either a Marvel movie or a new line of energy drinks.)

– Purpose* is all about “Common Cause,” which is corporate for “remind everyone why they’re here, besides the free donuts.”
– Function* means making sure the org chart doesn’t look like a plate of spaghetti.
– Energy* is about re-energizing teams, ideally without resorting to cattle prods or motivational posters featuring eagles.

SHIFT Happens™: Now With 100% More Acronyms

Orion also offers SHIFT Happens™, a leadership paradigm so advanced it comes with its own acronym: Support, Honesty, Integrity, Fairness, and Trust. This is a radical departure from the old paradigm, which was mostly about Surviving, Hiding, Ignoring, Faking, and Tolerating.

The iLeader™: Because Lowercase Letters Are the Future

Specializing in “intrapreneuring” (which is like entrepreneuring, but with more meetings), Orion helps companies manage their multigenerational workforce. This involves finding common ground between Gen Z, Millennials, and the one guy who still uses a fax machine. The goal is to create “high energy effective teams,” which is consultant-speak for “teams that don’t immediately delete your emails”.

Form Follows Dysfunction: Finally, an Honest Slogan

Orion’s philosophy recognizes that most businesses are, at their core, slightly dysfunctional families with better PowerPoint skills. Their solution? Replace fear with innovation, negativity with creativity, and rhetoric with open communication. In other words, pretend your office is a family Thanksgiving, but with fewer arguments about politics and more about who moved the cheese.

Conclusion: The Future Is Human (Again), Until the Robots Figure Out How to Hold Team-Building Retreats

So, next time your company’s AI-powered synergy cloud solution fails to deliver, remember: the real technology was inside us all along. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Mars.

*Disclaimer: No consultants were harmed in the making of this article, but several were gently rebranded as “facilitators.

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Business Profile

The Technology of Business

“There is no greater combination than experience coupled with a dream!”

Orion coaches and guides company leaders through strategic planning, scenario

planning, and coaching from investment, startups, product launch, turn-arounds,

international expansion and high growth phases. Bob Root and Wendy Steele, as

founding partners, and the entire team use their experiences as line executives in

technology startups and Fortune 500 companies to guide leaders to higher level

business opportunities.

Our Business and Our Customers

• High Technology, Bio-Tech and eCommerce startups who are looking for

business guidance, investment sources, developing a common cause,

organizational structuring, strategic partners and market execution.

• Turn-around situations requiring restructuring, strategic investing, refocusing

organizational efforts, interim executive management and experienced

guidance.

• Mergers, investment and acquisitions, planning, execution, due diligence,

culture change management and strategy.

• New product or division launches guidance from concept, pre-planning,

investment and startup through growth phase.

• International business expansion through market, distribution channel and

strategic partner development.

• Identification and introduction to strategic partners, OEM customers and

distribution channels

• Investor assurance through executive coaching, board membership, interim

management, experienced guidance, organizational structuring, strategic

planning, key talent recruiting and fiscal guidance.

What Our Customers Value

• Our actual experience as CEO, COO, Vice Presidents and line managers

who had P&L responsibility in high technology and Fortune 500 companies.

• Fast results.

• We are doers, coaches, facilitators and guides who understand the needs of

the people, leaders, customers, vendors and the investors of a company.

• We have lived through acquisitions, mergers and divestitures.

• Worldwide practical experience in opening, developing and launching new

markets.

• A positive perspective that is results oriented whatever the situation.

• We are passionate about building successful teams and companies.

Perspective

“This is not a consulting company who speaks in theories or wastes

time. The combined force of Orion Business Development bridges

the business, financial, brand marketing and the organizational

factors necessary for companies to flourish. What qualifies them is

Bob & Wendy’s combined 45 years experience in actually running

companies and a team who are real people who have had real

jobs,” touts, Jim Belasco, Author of the best selling books, “Flight of

the Buffalo, “Teaching the Elephant to Dance” and “Soaring with the

Phoenix”. “Bob has lead 10 turn-arounds in high tech and bio tech

companies. All alive and all growing. He has started five high tech

startups. Wendy has built large and small organizations. As VP of

Human Resources for Coca-Cola, she helped bring profound

change to the company swiftly and surely. With high tech and other

startups under her belt, she understands and knows the human

factor side of making a business successful.”

 

Bob, Wendy and the Orion Team are not consultants who live with you touting process,

assessment, systems, billable hours and creeping excellence. Nor are they people who

promote untested business theory. They use their experience as people who have had

real P&L responsibility and who recognize that shift does not come from process

change, it comes from people’s passion toward change. They guide leaders and their

people to create new ways to view issues and problems, encouraging them to act and

think differently. All the time using what they learned “along the way” to assure that the

right steps are taken at the right time.

Orion’s guidance is grounded in true line experience starting, turning around and

running companies. It is balanced with a realization of the motivations of the new multi-

generational workers and experienced line management techniques.

 

Through their “Trilogy™” program, the Orion Team simplifies company plans, goals, functions,

operations and the energy and the commitment of their team. They reframe these plans

so that everyone in the organization understands them, embraces them and implements

them within their sphere. They build high energy teams focused on results, where

everyone in the organization has a direct line of sight to the customer.

Each partner is an experienced line management professional who achieves results

swiftly and efficiently through people. Each believes that the next frontier beyond

technology is human potentiality. They believe that every single person in the

organization must have clear line-of-sight to a customer–that the most successful

businesses are managed from the customer inward.

Orion Senior Partners:

Bob Root

Co-author of Defining Moments, a CEO, line manager, and America’s Cup sailor

with a proven 25 year track record of growing people and organizations. With ten

turn-arounds ranging form small eCommerce startups through multi-Billion Dollars

international companies and five startups in high tech, software and biotech, he

brings a real world perspective to business. He is not stuck in the old, but blends

experience with a vivid imagination. He is a futurist, technologist, brand manager

and noted speaker; Success Magazine ranked Bob as, “One of the most creative

leaders in high tech…the Imagineer.

 

”Wendy Steele

Co-author of Defining Moments, a 20 year executive record at Coca-Cola, CSX

and Sea-Land in building teams and interpersonal dynamics. As Vice President of

Human Resources, her work at Coke helped the company become the most

admired company in America. She is a master in conflict resolution, knows what it

takes to motivate individuals and teams while maintaining a hard eye on achieving

bottom-line results.

Their work to create high energy effective teams has been recognized by Time

Magazine, CNN, USAToday, numerous trade organizations and the company has been

ranked number one and “Best Practices” by The Disney Institute.

Form Follows Dysfunction…The Human Factors

The Orion Team understands how to guide leaders to empower their teams to greatness

by replacing fear with innovation, negativity with creativity and rhetoric with open

communications. They balance the business aspects and specialize in building

relationships that build solid business, growth and innovation. They guide leaders to the

realization that it is a blend of Teamwork, Talent and Technology that will drive their

business, financial and organizational success!

“With us, they first focused a great deal of their energy on

rebuilding rapport, trust and communication within our team.

Through creative energizing programs they taught us the art &

science of inclusion, conflict resolution, suspending judgment to

build creativity and the positive aspect of taking risks

“Where there was mistrust they rebuilt it, where there was fear, they

erased it, where there was complacency they energized it and

where there was paralysis, they unblocked it. What was interesting

is that once we trusted each other again, the business guidance

they gave us rocketed us forward crashing through our own stretch

goals”

CT,a high tech CEO

The iLeader™…Intrapreneuring: Leading Multigenerational Workforce

Orion specializes in finding common ground between the new multigenerational work

force and senior line managers. They guide teams to recognize the power of inclusion,

suspending judgement, influencing with integrity and with a hard line focus on doing the

real work.

“We work with all members to take responsibility and break through their fears to

develop innovative new ways to work together as a team, solve problems and to

become passionate about their company,” said Wendy Steele.

Trilogy™ Program

Today’s businesses have become too complicated and running so fast that they miss

opportunities to do more with less. The keywords for people are relationships,

simplification and balance. This is true for companies as well. Under the philosophy

that only self-confident people can be simple, Orion guides companies to simplify their

operations so that everyone can understand the plan they help create, organize and

streamline their functions and execute them with passion and energy.Trilogy focuses on three areas of simplification circled by a new definition of leadership.

 

They are: Purpose, Function and Energy.

Purpose covers the area of “Common Cause”, planning, goals and measurement. Bob

& Wendy help a company to refocus their energy on their customer and their cause.

They ask the simple, hard questions of what is the business, who is the customer and

what does the customer value? These answers drive a “Cause” statement…the

company’s reason for being. This will drive simple, easy to understand and pointed

mission, vision and action statements. With these in hand, Orion guides the teams to

create simple, reasonable and attainable goals for every person in the company…cross-

linking goals to build to company-wide goals. They then helps to develop a

measurement and compensation and motivation program where every person

recognizes their daily contribution to the attainment of corporate goals.

Function covers the area of organizational effectiveness. Orion reviews organizational

structures, hierarchy and map them to the establish goals and cause of the company.

Along with departmental, division, group and executive leaders, They reapply energy

and function to the areas that most directly effect the customer and goals of the

company. Function is a broad term that recognizes real change comes from everyone

living the change. That change is constant and each member is chartered with the

ability to bring about change. Here we teach a very advanced, yet simple technique,

where people observe, orient, decide and act on their own.

Energy is the third and perhaps most profound facet of the Trilogy program. Orion will

often implement experiential programs to re-energize everyone in the company to work

toward the common cause of the whole. To recognize their contribution and gain a

passion for the cause. They work to create an environment of innovation, open

communication and one where fear is minimized.

SHIFT Happens™

Orion also coaches management to echo the facets of Purpose, Function and Energy

as a new paradigm of highly effective dynamic leadership where change is constant and

hierarchy minimized. They are taught to listen, understand, accept and lead through the

principles of Support, Honesty, Integrity, Fairness and Trust. This new form of

leadership overly simplifies, minimizes conflict and recognizes, rewards and honors

change.

 

Partner Profile

Partner: Bob Root

Business Practice: Turn-around Coaching & Consulting, Startups,

Executive & Management Coaching, Brand Management, Technology

Futurist, Market Development, IPO & Public Company Operations,

Organizational Transformation, Merger & Acquisitions, Strategic

Business Development & Negotiations and Press & Governmental

Advocacy

Organizational Practice: Executive Coaching, Team Development,

Advanced Human Potentiality, Empowerment Coaching, Change

Management, Scenario based Strategic Planning, Futurist, and

Technologist.Overview:

Bob is a former high tech and Fortune 500 CEO/COO/President turn-around

expert. He has been described as a bold highly creative and imaginative

internationally experienced senior executive. Bob has a 25 years history of

developing and implementing programs that aggressively reposition the

products or services of companies to meet the constantly changing global

marketplace. Financial growth and long term company stability has been

accomplished through positioning, systems innovation and exploring human

potentiality .

• Recognized expert in translating complex issues into business

implications and impact.

• Powerful bold marketeer and brand manager noted for trend

based product/market positioning resulting in high growth

brand image.

• Superb combination of strategic planning and tactical

execution.

• Expert in matching company’s products or services to it’s

market.

• Creative personal coaching style complimented by bold

management, yielding quick and lasting results.

• A change agent whose path is one of growth, building and

goal attainment through people as the source of success.

“Talking Doctor”

• A futurist & technologist with extensive experience in the world

markets.

Partner Profile

Partner: Wendy S. Steele

Business Practice: Turn-Around Consultant & Coach, Startups,

Executive & Management Coaching, Change Management Coaching,

Recruiting, Retention

Organizational Practice: Change Management, Conflict & Dispute

Resolution, Executive & Senior Management Coaching, Human

Resources Management, Mediation, Merger & Acquisitions Transition

Consulting, Labor Relations, Union Avoidance

Overview:

Strong leadership background in establishing and maintaining productive

business partnerships gained during 18 years of vice president and director

level human resources management. Known for entrepreneurial spirit and

expertise in providing innovative people-building coaching, management,

technical and strategic consultative services with a sense of urgency and a

bias for action to provide bottom-line results. Ability to identify gaps and

opportunities, set direction and develop strategies to maximize human

potential and support business objectives to achieve organizational goals.

Her special strengths include:

• Complex Organizational and Cultural Change

• Workforce Development and Strategic Planning• Organizational Learning & Organizational Communication

• Workforce Assessment, Selection & Recruiting

• Operational Change Management

• Collaborative Interpersonal Skills

• Expatriate/International Administration

• Job Design and Competencies

• Union Avoidance/ Labor Management Relations

• Masters Degree in Conflict Resolution

Client Profile:

Startups, Turn-arounds, small divisions of larger companies and product/project teams.

In 2010, the company repositioned itself to focus on the natural products industry. In

2016, the company plans to expand it field of focus back into the pharmaceutical market

as they transition to new natural functional biopharmaceuticals