THE POINT OF US
We take immense pride in the technical quality of our consulting work. But we also know what it means to manage people, organizations, and budgets, and this has taught us to be resolutely uninterested in shiny objects or reports that gather dust.
We have an allergy to jargon and a bias for action.
We want to leave our clients better, stronger, and in fact happier.
OUR STORY
Decades of Passionate Work
We cut our teeth in post-conflict zones, refugee crises, and communities left behind by employers. By the 2000s, you’d have found our present leadership group managing small businesses, nonprofits, philanthropies, academic organizations, or even combat units.
We came together and founded our consulting practice in San Francisco in 2009 as Schaffer & Combs, and emerged from the Covid crisis as OE Consulting.
OUR PURPOSE
People, Planet, Productivity
We believe that the power of money and markets should be harnessed to best support thriving people and a healthy planet. So we support the success of organizations that pursue similar goals.
We’re agnostic about whether an organization is for profit or non — no margin, no mission. But if we detect a want of ethical discernment, we will direct our efforts elsewhere.
OUR PRACTICE
Good leaders manage each component of their organization well. Great leaders see the whole, the system, and manage it as one thing.
Sometimes we engage with clients on a single process: an executive search, an organizational redesign, a long-term strategic vision. Over time, we tend to work with the whole organization.
It’s unusual for a firm to practice both executive search and deep strategy work. We combine the services because over decades of work, we learned a crucial lesson. When talent, strategy, and organizational structure are in close and intentional harmony, when every contributor understands the why as well as the what, when outcomes are ever in mind, transformation follows.
This work is intimate. Done well, it requires both trust and clarity between client and consultant. You’ll find us open to multiple conversations whether a transaction follows or not. Unless you’re in a hurry; in that case, we’re ready to get to work, and we’ll build that trust as we go.
