SHEILA CAMPBELL

Sheila Campbell is the founder and president of Wild Blue Yonder. Her career began in advertising and public relations where she was a vice president at the ad agency Earle Palmer Brown. She left EPB to co-found Rosenthal, Greene & Campbell, an advertising and public relations agency whose clients included Marriott Hotels and regional Apple Computer.

Sheila eventually found a new passion – organizational development – the field in which she got her Masters from The American University. Fascinated by the latest advances in business knowledge, Sheila takes the leading and most recent academic learning on strategy, creativity, and organizational development and applies it, using practical methods she develops, to help businesses and organizations face their futures.

Johns Hopkins University recognized her talents as a teacher and employed Sheila to teach both strategy and creativity in their graduate marketing program.

She maintains a deep interest in marketing and is the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Advanced Advertising Studies, which is sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). In association with AAAA, Sheila also conducts workshops in strategic planning and account management relationships for ad agency groups around the country.

Sheila founded Wild Blue Yonder to more fully engage her talents and interests in organizational development. She designs and conducts strategic planning retreats for senior business executives throughout North America, has taught creative thinking skills to such diverse groups as nuclear engineers, airport executives, and advertising agency account managers. She is the co-author with Merianne Liteman of Retreats That Work, published by Jossey-Bass. Retreats That Work is currently the leading work on planning and conducting successful offsite meetings.

In her off time, Sheila hikes wilderness areas like the Sahara, the Amazon, the Himalayas, or U.S. high desert. She's a docent at the National Gallery of Art, where she has served as chairman of the adult weekend docent programs. She's now working on a new book about her experiences walking alone across England.

Strategy
“A strategic inflection point is that time in the life of a business when the fundamentals shift radically. When it comes the business has a choice –  reinvent itself or face decline. What’s scary is how hard it is to see these inflection points coming.”

Organizational Change
“Some of the coming changes can be predicted and you have time to plan for them but others can’t be foreseen -- you need a way to convert unpredictable change into strategic change. Realizing that you can’t fully trust your assumptions, one approach is to look at the future not as a continuation of the past. You can’t trust your trend analyses or even trust what your customers tell you. ”

Retreats 
“Make no mistake: just when the executives think a retreat is a great idea, the staff cringe at the retreat memo. ‘Oh, no, please don’t make us go,’ they say to each other. Some will love the idea of dedicating time to talk about new ideas and maybe hang out with more senior leaders. Others will dread the very same thing. So why incur the costs and take the risks? Because they pay off big when done right.”

Creative Thinking
“The richest source of original marketing ideas will often be – surprise -- everyone outside the creative department. Creative thinking, which is an acquired skill, can help people see how to eliminate unnecessary and redundant work, streamline processes, and work more effectively as a team.”