© BBG, LLC 2005

BBG Principals
Email address: Nidar@betterboardgovernance.com

The Better Board Governance organization comprises more than 100 years of collective corporate executive and board governance experience.

 

The partners have pooled their diverse business expertise and common educational backgrounds to spearhead meaningful change in the board governance of corporations and non-profit organizations. The four principals work cooperatively and each leads one of the four practice concentrations of BBG: Assessment, Research, Training and Consulting.   

 

 

Currently serving as a University Professor of Public Relations at Emporia State University, Dr. Nida leads the research practice at BBG.  His expertise includes strategic management and strategic plan development, performance assessment,  change management, and key constituent communication.  His skills include designing, conducting, analyzing and providing meaningful feedback from large-scale research efforts that reveal both the need and assess organizational readiness for change. 

 

As a corporate executive for more than 20 years, Dr. Nida has worked at a Fortune 50 petroleum company (Phillips), a mid-cap retail chain (Payless ShoeSource), and a micro-cap entertainment company (Rentrak). His various responsibilities included organizing and serving as the principal writer of  the corporate strategic plan and mission statement; providing staff support for board meetings; writing the annual report and planning the annual shareowners’ meeting; and planning conference calls and financial analyst’s reports and interactions.

 

Dr. Nida is a prolific researcher, writer and presenter  at professional association meetings. He holds a doctorate in organizational communication and quantitative research methodologies from Ohio University. He has served on several nonprofit boards and provided staff support for corporate boards.  As a former corporate executive, he brings knowledge, practical experience and leadership in shaping and selling a vision of a company to its key constituencies, including employees, suppliers, customers, and investors. As a university professor, he offers a totally independent and objective viewpoint to corporate and nonprofit governance. Key graduate courses that he has taught include managerial communication, conflict resolution, and communication and change.

Barry Spiker leads the consulting practice at BBG. He brings more than 20 years’ experience leading organizational change and directing human capital development and management. A management consultant, business strategist and theoretician, Mr. Spiker draws from his background in the private sector as both corporate executive and start-up entrepreneur and from his knowledge as an educator and researcher.  He currently combines consulting and teaching in managerial skills and organizational change as the Markley Visiting Professor of Management at Miami University’s Richard T. Farmer School of Business in Oxford, Ohio. 

 

Formerly a Practice Leader and Executive at Andersen Consulting (now, Accenture), Dr. Spiker also has held a Managing Director position at Price Waterhouse (now “PWC”) and served as Vice President of the TQM practice at Mercer Management Consulting, as well as serving six years as an internal OD and HR manager/executive consultant at Honeywell. Dr. Spiker has led sophisticated global organization change and communication initiatives in the e-Commerce, hospitality, manufacturing, freight airline, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, utilities, government and communications industries. 

 

Dr. Spiker earned a Ph.D. with emphases in Organization Development, Communication and Quantitative Methods from Ohio University. Among other subjects, Mr. Spiker developed and/or taught courses in Consulting, Culture Change & Development, Organizational Communication, and Quantitative/Qualitative Research. He has published 9 books and 15+ refereed articles in applied research, communication, organizational development and systems theory. His subject expertise, analytical research and incisive forecasting make Mr. Spiker a contributing leader in the emerging science of “transformation,” the next evolution of change management. 

 

 

Mr.Coonfield is the training practice leader at BBG. He just completed an eight-year tenure as a member of the Board of Directors of Kitty Hawk Airlines, a large, non-integrated cargo carrier.  His primary areas of expertise include executive leadership, executive coaching, building effective boards, and  successful meeting management.  Mr. Coonfield has taught thousands of managers leadership and team building, facilitated hundreds of quality improvement teams in diverse industries, and is certified in a number of leadership and organizational assessment instruments.   

       

As a consultant, Mr. Coonfield‘s clients have ranged from transportation companies (America West Airlines), financial institutions (Key Bank), to manufacturing, high tech, and engineering firms, including a number of Fortune 500 companies.  He also served as a senior officer at Kitty Hawk, Inc. for a number of years, spearheading large merger and integration projects, developing leadership capability, and consulting in quality and corporate communication.  Recently, he served on then Oregon Governor-Elect Kulongoski’s Transition Team. He has 16 years experience in government, working in the State of Oregon Executive Department managing training and consulting for 5000 managers and 48,000 employees.

 

Mr. Coodfield graduated from Texas Christian University with an MFA degree in communication and has done extensive graduate training in counseling and communication. He has published both academic and popular press articles on communication and change management. Last year his most recent publications included an article on involving employees in “e-change” strategies, in Line 56, a leading high tech journal, and “Communication in the Boardroom,” published in Director’s Monthly.

Dr. Richard Hunter provides leadership for the assessment practice at BBG. He continues to be a full-time consultant, building on the board governance consulting practice be developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which pioneered many of the board strategies and solutions that are only now being seriously contemplated by the private sector of U.S. business. Dr. Hunter is particularly skilled at pinpointing organizational and interpersonal strategic issues that prevent a board from functioning at its peak capacity. 

 

Over the past two decades, he has conducted a number of board governance seminars, has worked in a consulting capacity with a several boards to enhance their effectiveness, and continues to conduct research relevant to improving board performance. He also has conducted nearly a thousand qualitative focus group sessions throughout the US, primarily gauging the success of new product development efforts and exploring service quality issues. More recently, these services have been tailored to compliment companies who have adopted the Balanced Scorecard management measurement process. He is an accomplished consultant to service-intensive industries such as health care, telecommunications and utilities.

 

Dr. Hunter earned his doctorate degree in communication from Ohio University, a clinical masters degree in counseling psychology and a second masters degree in interpersonal communication. He has taught a broad range of communication courses at the undergraduate and graduate university level. He also is noted for having developed a comprehensive computer-assisted behavioral health care clinical outcomes process which continues to result in thousands of clinical assessments yearly.