About Cris Hagen
Cris Hagen is a consultant, author, and presenter who helps organizations achieve business results while simultaneously creating a climate that fosters professional growth and strong commitment to organizational objectives. His approach to consulting focuses on helping executives, managers, and internal staff to develop the capabilities and competencies for positive growth and change.
With a strong foundation in whole systems change, Cris has helped clients to think "out of the box" with regard to improving business processes and outcomes, providing systematic ways for examining both the tangible and intangible elements that influence business results. His broad background includes experience in organization and leadership development, project management, team building for results, organization design, business process re-engineering, organization assessment, and strategic change and communications.
In the recent past, Cris has been the consulting team lead on three global ERP projects (SAP and Oracle) with clients in the life sciences, bio-diagnostics, and insurance industries, and on two of those projects traveled to Europe to lead meetings with country managers and prepare their respective sites for a smooth transition to the new system. His work on these projects touched hundreds of employees as he conducted change readiness workshops and surveys to prepare employees for change and identify potential barriers to a successful implementation of the new system. On a recent project, Cris developed a roadmap and methodology to support a client in establishing an Office of Global Business Systems, whose responsibility will be to manage and re-engineer many of its business processes in order to achieve targeted returns on the investment made in the new ERP system.
As consulting team-lead for the change management team with an international entertainment company, Cris' efforts were instrumental in helping business leaders from nine separate business units to build consensus on the overall approach for implementing a company-wide strategic sourcing initiative. The goal was to shave millions of dollars off of its annual spend on key commodities. This was the first time that business units within this company had successfully teamed together to achieve these kinds of cost reductions.
In all of his consulting engagements, Cris collaborates closely with internal staff to achieve results and build capability. The blend of internal knowledge and expertise about the organizational and political dynamics brought by internal staff, coupled with the proven tools and techniques that Cris brings to the engagement typically creates a synergy that is hard to beat. Cris has developed and conducted workshops to help client HR organizations build capability for becoming more strategic business partners with their internal clients, and help internal staff improve their consulting capabilities.
Cris began his career in Human Resource and Organization Development working with one of the country's pre-eminent consulting and training firms -- University Associates, Inc., where he completed UA's Intern Program and served as Registrar for the Graduate School of Human Resource Development while managing the Professional Services Department.
Cris further developed his expertise through 15 years of internal corporate experience working in both management and non-management roles in such corporations as San Diego Gas & Electric, Rockwell International, and Prudential Healthcare. More recently, Cris has worked on large-scale change projects as a Principal Consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, as Director of Transition Management Solutions with The Genesis Group, and as an independent consultant where he was requested to sub-contract his consulting services to Deloitte Consulting in order to support their engagement on a global Oracle project.
Cris holds a Masters degree in Counseling from San Diego State University, and a BS in Sociology from UC San Diego. He has been an international presenter for workshops, conferences, and presentations.
