If you can dream it, you can do it. Walt Disney

Idea Champions trainings are a great way to help employees become more creative on the job. Kelly Salita, Chicago Board of Trade  MORE

Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff is the co-founder and President of Idea Champions. He specializes in leading highly engaging creative thinking and teambuilding sessions that enable individuals, teams and entire organizations to develop new products, services, and breakthrough ways of doing business. Educated at Lafayette College and Brown University, Mr. Ditkoff has worked with a wide variety of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies who have realized the need to do something different in order to succeed in today's rapidly changing marketplace. These clients include: GE, Merck, Allianz, Lucent Technologies, NBC Universal, AT&T, Goodyear, Pfizer, A&E Television Networks, General Mills, MTV Networks, Duke Corporate Education, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

At the heart of his work lies the fundamental belief that a company's most important capital asset is the collective brain power, creativity and commitment of its work force and that this asset can be significantly leveraged when people are provided with the appropriate setting, systems, tools and techniques to think (and act) out of the box.

Prior to his work with Idea Champions, Mr. Ditkoff was a principal in Ki Learning Systems and a Senior Consultant with the Inner Game Corporation — both organizational development firms dedicated to catalyzing superior performance in the workplace.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Ditkoff is also an accomplished public speaker and writer. Author of Banking on Innovation, Free the Genie and the forthcoming Awake at the Wheel, Mr. Ditkoff has appeared on numerous radio and television talk shows. Additionally, he is the founder of Face the Music, the world's only interactive business blues band. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, Evelyne, and their two children, Jesse (13) and Emilia (11).

Val Vadeboncoeur has served as a senior consultant for Idea Champions since 1990 and believes that the two most essential skills an individual needs to master the Protean landscape of modern business are the ability to innovate and be a lifelong learner on the job.

Through the years, Val has worked closely with a wide range of forward-thinking American companies, focusing on innovation and teambuilding. These clients include: AT&T, Lucent, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley, Scotia Capital, Ernst & Young, TIAA-CREF, and Price Waterhouse as well as a number of non-profit organizations. He has also worked previously with Unison Business Development on organizational development and visioning projects for Champion International, Home Insurance, Olin Corporation, Zurich Insurance and Life Care Centers of America, a leading provider of nursing home care. He also works as a performer/consultant with Face The Music, an interactive business blues band (his "blues" name is "Professor Voodoo").

Val is, most recently, involved in developing two new Idea Champion trainings for intact work teams: Drumming Up Teamwork, which features group hand drumming and Play At Work! which utilizes improvisational theatre techniques to build greater leadership,communication and team skills.

Mr. Vadeboncoeur, who is part Mic Mac Indian, was born and raised in Rhode Island, and educated at Boston University. His checkered past includes being a radio disc jockey, writer, director, actor and producer of art exhibits. He's also striven mightily after an elusive competency on various musical instruments. His last name is French for "go of a good heart," and his nickname is "Moose." He currently resides in Malden-On-Hudson, NY.

Lynnea Brinkerhoff
Idea Champions is thrilled to finally have Lynnea Brinkerhoff on board. We've been trying for years to find a way and, finally, it has happened! With a Masters in Organizational Development from Pepperdine University's prestigious MSOD program and a B.A. in International Business from Simmons College, Lynnea is quickly becoming our "go to" person for anything having to do with organizational change. Among her many accomplishments, Lynnea has: 1) Helped revitalize aging multinational organizations such as Ace Hardware, Spalding, Coca Cola, and American Express; 2) Conducted long-term executive coaching interventions; 3) Mediated conflict resolution sessions between individuals and entire departments; 4) Helped organizations make the shift from command and control to a team-based environment and; 5) Implemented organizational effectiveness interventions for organizations as different from each other as the Native American Tribal Council is from Wall Street. Lynnea has also been "on the inside," having held management positions at Southwestern Bell and the Marriott Corporation. The throughline in all her work? Turning breakdowns into breakthroughs - in a way that engages and empowers.

In addition to her work with Idea Champions, Lynnea is also the Co-Founder of Acacia Tree, an international consulting firm that takes corporate leadership teams to places of real need around the world in an effort to help companies develop - real-time - their individual and organizational potential. Lynnea lives in Milford, CT with her soulmate, Michael, and her wonder-child, Jamie, 7.

Farrell Reynolds has been an innovator in the fields of sales, marketing, operations and training for almost 30 years, primarily in the broadcast and cable industries. In his role of sales and marketing executive, he has represented hundreds of television stations, creating and then coordinating the marketing and distribution efforts for their original documentary, dramatic, animated and sports programs and series.

Farrell joined Turner Broadcast Sales as Vice President/Account Executive. In 1987 he was appointed President. In this position he was responsible for the Corporation's $600 million annual revenue budget while administrating the annual $40 million expense budget of the 200 person division. During his tenure, Farrell was credited with building the most successful advertising sales organization in the cable industry. He was also a member of the seven person Executive Committee of the Corporation.

In 1993, he joined New World Communications as President and sole employee of New World Sales and Marketing, the national sales arm of the New World Communications Group. In 14 months, the sales and marketing company grew to 135 employees in nine offices, generating in excess of $300 million in spot and barter sales revenues. The company was sold to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Inc. in 1997 for 2.3 billion dollars

Subsequently Farrell spent two years as a visiting Professor at North Carolina State University and for the past several years has been a consultant specializing in coaching and strategizing with individuals and business teams, positioning them to identify and achieve their next levels of creativity, performance and profitability. Farrell's work with Idea Champions is all about helping forward thinking sales teams and their management become masterful communicators- adaptive, agile, artful, and wildly successful in their efforts to deliver real value to their customers.

Michael Schacker is the Chief Operating and Technology Officer of Ingenuity Bank, Idea Champions' next generation idea management software. Michael has been developing software for the past 19 years and is the creator of VisionMapper™, patent pending software that enables organizations to streamline their process of creating and executing a company-wide vision. (VisionMapper is currently being used at Warner Music, Xerox Illinois, GM The Works (GM Media division), and West LB. Drawing on his eight years of OD experience, Michael has also designed and developed online Leadership training for Pfizer. Additionally, he has successfully translated traditional training programs into interactive e-courses that have featured many of his breakthrough ideas, i.e. online branching simulations and structured discussion groups.

Michael, it must be known, is the visionary who originally conjured up the idea for Ingenuity Bank and proposed it to Idea Champions. We are all thankful to him for spearheading the development of this exciting new software and promise to send him and his wife to Bali just as soon as your company licenses Ingenuity Bank. Michael is a big proponent of high tech/ high touch and sees unlimited potential for idea management and visionary planning technology, especially if they supported by real-time sessions facilitated by experienced innovation consultants.

Michael believes that the future of Organizational Development lies in intranet design and how it can provide a robust "infostructure" for blended learning of various kinds. VisionMapper and Ingenuity Bank are the beginning of that future.

Michael lives in Willow, NY with his wife, Barbara, 17 year old daughter Melissa, 15 guitars and 2 violins.

Bill Shockley is a Senior Consultant with Idea Champions. Following a corporate career heading sales, marketing, and R&D for a division of a Fortune 500 company, and serving as CEO of an energy marketing company, he built a consulting practice to help companies innovate their sales and marketing programs.

In 2001, Bill turned his attention to the Front End of Innovation. Over the next several years he became a leading expert, working with over thirty major corporations. Not satisfied with the innovation results reported by many companies, he found that even those with strong innovation cultures and processes had omitted a key ingredient for success . creativity development.

Today, he works with Idea Champions to promote use of proven creativity tools in the Front End ideation process to provide more-likely-to-succeed ideas for the innovation pipeline.

"There are plenty of ideas, just not enough good ones," he says, "The logical and creative sides of the brain need to work together, but in most innovation processes, including employee involvement and voice of the customer, they do not. The tools exist; they just need to be implemented. Idea Champions' Ingenuity Bank is a great solution."

Michael Pergola MA, MBA, JD, is a management consultant, lawyer, and ordained interfaith minister. As a long time student of culture change, individual development, behavioral science, organizational dynamics, and the world.s wisdom traditions, Michael has pursued personal mastery and an understanding of consciousness, culture and creativity for over 30 years. He served six years as Chief Knowledge Officer for Risk at one of the five largest banks in the United States, practiced law at Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering in Washington D.C. for nine years, and has founded a variety of businesses and non profit organizations. An honors graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Michael also has a Masters degree in Social Structure and Interpersonal Dynamics from Penn, and a law degree and MBA from Cornell. He is trained in systems thinking, scenario planning, social network analysis, creativity, visioning, facilitation, conflict resolution, business process analysis, risk management, intellectual property, technology assessment, emotional intelligence, and biofeedback.

As an external consultant, Michael has worked with leadership teams and operating groups in small, mid-market, and Fortune 500 companies. He excels at identifying the human and organizational dynamics that block breakthrough success, and designing integral approaches to create cultures of innovation that optimize long term value. Michael has a capacity to synthesize large bodies of information in order to develop comprehensive approaches that empower individuals, teams and organizations to create new ways of doing business, respond creatively to changing environments, and take full advantage of emerging market opportunities

Michael's clients have included First Union, Wachovia, Cigna, Aetna, Prudential Securities, Tompson International, The West Group, Dow, Lohnes and Albertson, FERC, Fannie Mae, Honda, Ford, Chrysler, Li & Fung, Liz Claiborne, The State University of New York and One Spirit Learning Alliance.

Tim Moore a renaissance man extraordinaire, juggles three balls at Idea Champions. He is our chief strategic communication consultant, a skilled brainstorm facilitator, and one of our Bandwidth Leaders for BrainTrust. A life-long learner, Tim keeps his skills up to date in a wide array of fields, including information architecture, social psychology, emotional intelligence, contemporary art and design, and social media. He combines many of his interests in a process he calls Sales Proptimizing^TM. Explains Tim, "Simply put, Sales Proptimizing^TM is a process for creating word of mouth. It helps individuals, teams and organizations identify their authentic hooks and memes - their unique, irreducible sales propositions, then teases out simple phrases and images that can communicate their core offerings effortlessly."

Tim's knack for the sticky is evidenced by a string of international song hits. A highly successful recording artist and songwriter, Tim has released five hook-laden albums on David Geffen's Asylum record label and toured throughout the globe. Tim brings to Idea Champions clients the verbal brevity and timing of a master song lyricist, coupled with an uncanny sense of what will stick in the popular memory. "Hit songs are memes," Tim says. "They grab people on multiple levels, and do it with incredible economy and simplicity." Hence Tim's passion and skill for drilling down to the essence of things and transforming that simplicity into actionable ideas that foment trends, create buzz, and make good things unforgettable. Tim holds a BFA from Temple University where he majored in painting and contemporary sculpture. He's a long time resident of Woodstock, NY,

Ondine Norman brings more than 20 years of teambuilding and communications training experience to Idea Champions. A licensed psychotherapist and former actor/dancer, Ondine helps her clients develop effective communication skills by becoming better observers of themselves in both their professional and personal lives.

Ondine believes that coaching is a collaborative effort. With Ondine's approach, her clients first identify and describe their own personal interactive style. Ondine then works closely with the client to develop a congruency of language, physical presence and emotional intelligence. In addition to her coaching expertise, Ondine is also quite skillful at facilitating visioning and strategy sessions for executives. Her clients have included NASA, Sprint PCS, Booz-Allen Hamilton, UC Berkeley and many others.

Known for her warmth and inviting nature, Ondine excels at establishing a trusting atmosphere where people feel comfortable taking risks while learning and practicing new skills. Ondine also helps her clients gain insight into their own core values, helping them align those values with the vision of their company. She is particularly gifted at teaching people how to engage in difficult conversations in the workplace, a skill many clients go on to apply in their personal lives as well.

Ondine is a certified mentor coach for the Newfield Network, a highly acclaimed coaching school accredited by the International Coach Federation.

Bill Ross has worked with Idea Champions for many years, as a writer, editor, technology consultant, and trainer. Most recently, he has driven the development and launch of our new blog, "The Heart of Innovation," and now manages and writes for it.

Bill has over 20 years experience helping people understand how to improve their communications via the right use of technology. He has an extraordinary ability to make the complicated simple. He is a nationally recognized technical writer and was the editor and written voice of the original AltaVista's e-commerce site. Bill has worked for IBM, DEC, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Southeast Bank, and other organizations.

In 2006, Bill started "Rosswriting," his own technology and media blog, which has been cited periodically by the Boston Globe and WGBH (Boston's PBS affiliate).

In addition to Bill's technology efforts, he is also the chief writer for "The Champies," Idea Champions' newly launched, conference awards ceremony service.

Ron Rubio
With over 20 years of martial arts experience, Ron Rubio is Idea Champions' chief leadership warrior. Ron uses body-centered techniques to bring leaders and teams to the true source of their power: total mind-body engagement.

Everyone wants to be able to think on their feet in business. But most of us try to get there by ignoring everything between our head and feet. Ron is here to remind us that mind-body integration is crucial to alert performance. His unique Pathfinder and BodyKi work draws attention and power downward, taps into the body's deeper intelligence, and helps forward-thinking business leaders develop renewed focus, spontaneity, energy, power and confidence.

Although he holds a 4th degree black belt in Aikido today, Ron started out as an asthmatic and stutterer in childhood. He left home at 14 and worked his way through high school while playing football and excelling as a sprinter and hurdler. After moving to New York to pursue a dance career, Ron's nimble athleticism secured him a scholarship with the prestigious Alvin Ailey School of American dance. For the next 25 years he was a dance teacher, performer, choreographer.

Besides Aikido, Ron is equally versed in capoeira and close combat skills. This year he will partner with media sales legend, Farrell Reynolds, to teach warrior skills to sales teams, helping them "walk confidently into the dragons mouth" with even their toughest accounts and prospects.

Today, whether practicing aikido sword and staff, drumming, painting or teaching martial arts, Ron brings unstoppable energy to everything he does. And he knows how to impart that same fearlessness, enthusiasm and presence to anyone willing to seek the warrior within. His forthcoming book, "Mind/Body Techniques for Asperger's Syndrome: The Way of the Pathfinder" is the newest example of his positive, life-improving work. Ron lives in the Catskills Mountains of New York, with his wife Irene, three daughters, two dogs, two cats and a collection of samurai swords.

Bennett Neiman, PhD joined Idea Champions in 1995. He is a specialist in human motivation and communication. Early in his career at Idea Champions, he took his extensive background in strategic planning and visioning and combined it with Idea Champions' breakthrough creative thinking work and created "Visionary Team Planning," an inspirational and highly effective process that has helped teams all over the world move to a new level of collaboration and effectiveness. Bennett's highly acclaimed book, "Slay the Dragons - Free the Genie: Moving past negativity and resistance to get great results," is a major bi-product of this work. In addition to his M.A. in Communication and his PhD in Educational Psychology, Bennett is certified as a Gestalt therapist. His other specialty is in conflict resolution/team workout. Bennett has worked with individuals and teams all over America and Europe, helping people to set aside old hurts and frustrations and establish a new level of trust with each other. Prior to Idea Champions, Bennett was the CEO/Founder of a successful advertising agency in St. Louis for 11 years and a strategic planning/marketing consultant for seven. All of his work has been about motivating people to reach for more than they have and more than they think they are capable of achieving.

Steven McHugh is the co-founder and Chief Enlightenment Officer of Idea Champions.

For over 17 years, Steven has worked closely with top leadership, middle management and project teams to dramatically improve their business results. His multi-dimensional approach to meeting the needs of his varied clients is a skillful mix of business assessment, visioning, creative thinking, strategic planning, process redesign and Balanced Scorecard deployment.

Steven's clients include businesses in high tech, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare and telecommunications, including AT&T, Met Life, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Life Care Centers of America, Olin Corporation, Zurich US Insurance and numerous small and mid-sized companies.

As a business coach, Steven draws upon his diverse background as a gestalt psychotherapist and consultant to the corporate training, management, and construction industries. He is co-author of Get Out Of The Box, a creativity-based strategic planning workbook. He is also co-author of Scoreboard Pro™, a web-based business performance software service.

Steven resides in Boulder, Colorado and is an active volunteer and a long-standing advisory board member for the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. He enjoys white water rafting, kayaking, hiking, scuba diving, outdoor photography, fine wine, and really good sushi.

Sam Carter is the Senior Communications Coach for Idea Champions. His primary focus is helping business leaders become powerful presenters and public speakers. Sam has been a professional speaking coach for 13 years and has worked closely with executives and managers from a wide range of forward-thinking organizations, including Time Inc., Conde Nast Publications, The Bank of Tokyo, Morgan Stanley, and American Express. Sam is well known as an intuitive and high energy coach skillful at creating lasting results in the lives of the people he coaches. He was most recently a contributing writer to the book "Power Speaking: The Art of the Exceptional Public Speaker" published in 2005 by Allworth Press.

Sam is also a faculty member of the Actors Institute in New York City where he teaches acting and voice. He holds degrees in theater and communications from New York University and the ETW Conservatoire in Paris where he studied with Philippe Petit, as well as members of the famed Theatre du Soleil Company. He was a principal actor with the theater company "Boufons Theatre" for their national tours of France (1988-90) and a founding member of the Widemouth Theater Company in New York City.

In addition to his executive coaching work, Sam is also quite an accomplished playwright. His latest piece, China Black, was nominated for the 2004 Pinter Award for Drama.

John C. Havens is the "Chief Suitor" for Idea Champions, and serves as a brainstorm facilitator, needs assessment analyst and head of business development for Idea Champions' Free The Genie project. In gentler times, the tradition of courting involved polite suitors who would request the right to date someone's daughter. With respectful demeanor and an informed knowledge of their patron, eager young swains would win the hand of their beloved only after proving their trustworthiness to papa-san.

Today's business culture would recognize this metaphor as "relationship marketing" - a focus on establishing genuine connections with customers and employees rather than using bombastic advertising techniques to capture mindshare. At the end of the day companies get new clients by creating something of value that will enhance their clients' lives. Along those lines, there is no more precious gift than an idea that has found its time-and voice. Tools like Free The Genie empower people to turn their creative ideas into measureable results rather than merely brainstorm possibilities that never come to fruition. Like the adage of teaching a man to fish so he'll eat for the rest of his life, John's passion is helping floundering thinkers become informed innovators. (Not to mention winding up his bio with fish puns and ancient Chinese imagery.)

Currently residing in Maplewood, N.J. John is the proud father of two-year-old Nathan and baby girl (arriving May of '05). He's been married to wife Stacy since 1997, his most valued and rewarding project to date.

Barbara Cernak brings a wide range of experience to the Idea Champions team: teacher, professional actress, anthropologist, licensed psychotherapist, and coach. She has been corporate spokeswoman for General Foods, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Xerox Learning Systems, Bank of America, host of HBO's monthly classic movie channel and co-founder of The American Theatre Experiment, an ensemble theatre company in New York City.

Motivated by repeated requests from professional business people to help them become skillful presenters and public speakers, Barbara began to distill years of actor-training into a set of principles and practices for non-actors. The core principle of her approach is the cultivation of what every great actor has: presence - the ability to authentically connect with others in order to inspire them toward a desired outcome. Beyond improving presentation skills, Barbara's work is all about personal and social transformation - to help individuals become more fulfilled, teams become more high performing, and organizations able to elicit the best from their employees. It is this confluence of skills and passions that Barbara brings to the table in her position as Director of Training for Idea Champions' Breakthrough Café project.

She received her Master's degree in Social Welfare from SUNY-Albany, an M.A in Anthropology and a B.A. from The New School for Social Research. Barbara also has extensive training in leadership and coaching from the Coaches Training Institute. When ]not immersed in her work, you can find Barbara and her husband, Rob, practicing the fine art of Italian gardening on their property in the Hudson Valley.

Shawn Dempewolff-Barrett is a producer/writer/actor who, after receiving his B.A. in theater & sociology from Hampshire College, served as the Executive Director of Adventure Game Theater, a non-profit group delivering engaging workshops and summer camps for teens throughout the Northeast.

Later, Shawn served as the director of development for Mythix HMQ, an independent film & television production company based in New York. Over the past year, he has developed a feature-length screenplay currently being shopped by Nick Wechsler, (producer of the film "North Country") and was very involved with an internet-based television show that FOX is currently considering. Shawn also produced an internet-based documentary series focused on the lives of extraordinary young women.

Shawn facilitates Idea Champions' "Whose Job Is It, Anyway?" improv offering which is about as much fun as you can possibly have in a teambuilding session, except when "WJIIA?" is teamed up with our "Drumming Up Teamwork" offering and you get to play improv AND hand drums in the same session. Oh, baby!

Shawn currently lives in Brookyln, NY where he strives to be as hip as possible.

Evan Eisenberg Bandwidth Leader of BrainTrust, is a consultant, speaker, and widely published author known for combining cutting-edge ideas with dazzling style and delightful humor. A prolific generator of models, metaphors, and scenarios, he is adept at finding (and helping others find) the hidden patterns that join seemingly unrelated things — the matrix of true innovation.

As a consultant, Mr. Eisenberg has worked with Fortune 500 clients to develop new products, concepts, and marketing campaigns. His work with nonprofits has included advising the Doris Duke Foundation on the transformation of the Duke estate into a major center for research and education in landscape, ecology, and the arts. By drawing on the far-flung network of pioneering thinkers he has come to know in the course of his research, he provides BrainTrust with unmatched intellectual firepower.

His articles, essays, satire, and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the New York Times, and numerous other periodicals. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Ecology of Eden (Knopf, Vintage) and The Recording Angel, which will be reissued next year, in an expanded edition, by Yale.

Educated at Harvard and Princeton, Mr. Eisenberg has lectured and taught seminars at Harvard, Berkeley, and many other institutions. He has keynoted at major national conferences and has been featured on radio and television programs both in the U.S. and abroad.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Eisenberg has been a music columnist for The Nation, a synagogue cantor, and a gardener for the New York City parks department. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, an urban planner, and their daughter.

Howard Moody Senior Consultant with Idea Champions, specializes in team building, stress reduction, wellness, and group facilitation. He is also the founder of LifePlay — an educational consulting firm that has provided services for 100's of organizations, including Hartford Insurance, Digital Corp., Disney Development Corporation, Kraft Foods, Kidsports International and the Connecticut Special Olympics. In addition to his consulting work Howard has been a core faculty member for many years at Omega Institute, a world leader in holistic and alternative programming.

But wait! That's not all! Howard is also the co-founder of The Adventure Game Theatre, an extraordinary interactive learning process (featured on PBS and NPR).

Howard has trained with Project Adventure, the New Games Foundation, Play Leaders Association of America and with Fred Donaldson, founder of the International Playmate project. His educational background includes studies in alternative recreation at Goddard College as well as with Jean Houston's mystery school. Howard's mission is to help transform the 21st century workplace into an environment that encourages people to be themselves and operate at the highest level of insight, creativity and teamwork imaginable.

Nathan Brenowitz is a recent addition to the Idea Champions' core team of consultants in his role as Master Trainer of Idea Champions' new teambuilding offering, Drumming Up Teamwork. This novel approach to teambuilding utilizes the primal drumming circle as a way to help groups and teams (from 10 — 100 people) connect and communicate on a deeper level.

Nathan has been studying music since his mother enrolled him in the Julliard School of Music as a six year-old piano prodigy. He later utilized his piano background to become a blues and jazz trumpeter. A burning desire to travel took him to various exotic countries where his interest in world rhythms began to develop. Nathan has since studied drumming first hand (pun intended) from master drummers in Africa, Brazil, and most recently, Cuba. In addition to his musical studies, Nathan holds a Master's Degree in counseling from St. John's University in NY.

Eight years ago, marrying his musical and communication skills together, Nathan created his own breakthrough workshop, Rhythm Circle, which uses hand drumming to help participants get more deeply connected and "in tune" with each other. Since then, Nathan has worked with businesses both large and small throughout the United States. His gentle, positive, and non-threatening approach has been highly successful in bringing co-workers together to become more sensitive to each others' needs, strengths,and communication styles.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and a life-long baseball fanatic, Mr. Brenowitz still plays fast pitch baseball in over-40 leagues. He has two grown sons, Lukas and Matthew (both excellent conga drummers) and resides in Woodstock, NY.

Nancy Seroka oversees all aspects of Idea Champions' varied and multi-dimensional business, as Director of Operations. She has a diverse background which includes a wealth of experience in corporate environments and educational institutions.

Nancy is responsible for financial accounting, contracts, client relations, session logistics, marketing, and product sales. Her goal is to provide Idea Champions customers with the highest level of service possible.

Prior to Idea Champions, Ms. Seroka worked with major corporations in the NY Metro area as a principal in a marketing services agency. She has also coordinated Public Relations and Fund Raising departments for educational organizations, and has been involved in the successful production of hundreds of conferences on cutting edge topics.

Nancy has a Bachelor of Science in Communications from the State University of New York, and is an avid student of personal growth and the arts. She is a member of the American Society of Training and Development.

Nancy currently resides in Woodstock, NY.

Jesse Pouget Ditkoff: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" we asked Jesse when he was two years old. "Everything," he replied. Now, just four years later, Jesse has created an entirely new role for himself as Idea Champions' Director of Playfulness. You just never know when he'll return home from kindergarten, walk into the office and start playing with juggling balls... or start drawing colorful pictures WAY OUTSIDE the lines at "his desk." One time, when our esteemed "President" was about to go on a long road trip doing his usual last minute scurrying to pack, Jesse approached with a small plastic bottle in his hands. "Dada, do you have time to catch my bubbles before you go?" (Jesse also plays 3 dimensional chess, knows every Pokemon character, speaks French, loves swords, dragons, and computer games... and recently ate a double dip ice cream cone (raspberry and chocolate). Throws left, bats right.
Emilia Pouget Ditkoff: Ms. Ditkoff is in charge of just about everything at Idea Champions (and the world). Educated at Debbie's Play School and the outrageous byways of her imagination, Mimi is basically having a great time just about ALL the time. A master at making up games, hugging and doing unannounced pirouettes in the middle of the kitchen, Mimi is considering going on for her Ph. D, in instructional design (or maybe she'll just get a few more dollies.) An international consultant to people needing more laughter in their lives, Ms. Ditkoff has travelled to France, Mexico and Puerto Rico in the past three years (which is how long she has been on Planet Earth). Mimi also likes pasta, Rugrats, ice cream and her friend, Gracie.