From complexity to clarity to execution.

Your leadership team, 100% aligned — with a plan they can run without me.

If the plan is clear in the boardroom and stalled everywhere else, the problem isn't your talent — it's alignment. I deliver fixed-duration leadership alignment engagements — one day to one trimester — that take a leadership team from complexity to full alignment on purpose, priority, and execution. Every engagement includes a unique artwork capstone, composed by your team — and every engagement ends the same way: your team owns an aligned plan it can execute without the consultant in the room. That plan is the definition of done. And I bring forty years of early technology adoption — Internet 1.0 to AI — to the moment when alignment, prioritization, and decision-making determine the return.

Book Your Complimentary Conversation Start with the honest version

One senior operator. No staffing pyramid. Delivered anywhere in the world.

A letter, before the brochure

The honest version.

For fifteen years I ran a generalist consulting practice. I raised $80 million for a national manufacturing institute, advised a Fortune 100 utility for three years, helped build and sell a venture-backed startup. Good work. But when people asked what I did, the answer took a paragraph.

This practice is what happened when I finally asked myself the question I ask my clients: what is the one thing you do that creates the most value — and what would it look like to do only that? The answer, across forty years, has never changed.

I translate the complex into the clear. I align people who see the world differently. And I orchestrate the whole toward a winning end. Everything on this page is that one skill, offered three ways — to leadership teams, to rising managers, and to seasoned professionals starting their next chapter.

One more thread runs through it all: technology, early. I saw the internet for the first time in graduate school at Northwestern — my professor, teaching our class in Evanston, was using something called "the internet" to teach another class back home in England. I saw the future in that moment. It led me from the Museum to the front lines of Internet 1.0 at FastWeb.com, to building McDonald's first corporate intranet, to real-time climate-risk data at CartoFront. AI is that moment again — and alignment is how leaders will turn it into value.

If we work together, you'll get all of me: the operator who has sat in your chair, and the artist who will hand your team a capstone — a unique piece of art that captures your team's aligned perspective. And if we don't, I'll try to point you somewhere useful anyway. That's the deal.

— Jason Bennett Harris

The Work

Three offerings. One method. One promise.

The flagship — Leadership Team Consulting

Leadership Team Alignment

For CEOs and leadership teams of mid-market companies ($50M–$1B), PE portfolio companies, post-M&A integrations, and reorgs. The pain is always the same: the plan is clear in the room where it was written — and has landed nowhere else. Alignment work usually fails one of two ways: the priorities and process flow improvement doesn’t have clear next steps and ownership, and/or the strategic communication plan doesn’t engage the entire organization.

The cost is measurable, not soft. HBR research found only about half of top-team members can name their company's top priorities; PMI puts the waste from poorly executed initiatives at 11.4% of every project dollar. At a $200M company, that is a seven-figure line item every year. This practice is the disciplined middle: a defined start, a designed process, a clean, managed handoff — so your team owns and implements the plan.

Case Study: US McDonald's Transformation. I led the senior leadership team through the alignment and communication of the five-year transformation from the old Mansard-roof McDonald's to the modern, global brand — carried through 22 regional offices, 2,500 franchisees, and 14,000+ restaurants.

Read the one-page case study →  ·  Watch the 6-minute transformation film →

Alignment Day

For a board offsite, an annual kickoff, or one decision that's stuck.

  • Pre-day diagnostic call with the leader, plus participant pre-read
  • One full day: facilitated alignment workout on the #1 priority
  • The artwork: your team composes an alignment collage, same day
  • “What I heard” memo and workplan within 48 hours

$8,500 – $10,000 Flat fee. One room, one day, one priority.

Alignment Week

For a new quarter, a new leader, or a plan that hasn't landed.

  • Prior Prep Week, with Senior Leadership
  • Diagnostic interviews across the leadership team
  • Two-day facilitated working session
  • Collage capstone — the team makes an alignment artifact
  • Synthesis, workplan, and next steps by Friday
  • Follow on Implementation Week(s), with key point person(s)

$25,000 Flat fee. One week. Defined exit. Clear implementation & ownership.

Alignment Sprint

For a reorg, an integration, or the first 100 days after a close.

  • Week 1: diagnostics and interviews — leadership team and one layer down
  • Weekly facilitated workouts: priorities, ownership, communication plan
  • Collage capstone — the team makes an alignment artifact
  • Final week: executable workplan and operating rhythm, handed off

Begins at $50,000 Fixed fee set in scoping, two payment tranches. Four to six weeks.

Alignment Trimester

For a transformation, a new CEO's first year, or a company being remade.

  • Month of diagnostics and pre-planning
  • 120 days embedded with your leadership team
  • First 60: Research, team building, facilitated workouts
  • Next 60: Executable plan and operating rhythm at exit
  • Collage capstone — the team makes an alignment artifact

Begins at $100,000 Fixed fee set in scoping, three payment tranches. 120 days embedded.

Every engagement is a fixed fee — and the fixed fee is your protection: no meter running, no scope anxiety, no invoice surprises. Travel expenses are billed to the client at cost. Extended pre- and post-engagement work is scoped and billed separately, in writing, before it begins.

For rising managers

Leadership Operating System™

A 12-week cohort for high-potential managers promoted for excellence and handed no system for leading. Built on the OMCE Method™ — twelve modules, twelve deliverables shipped to their real teams, and a peer network they keep for the rest of their careers. Full program details below ↓

Corporate cohort from $95,000 · Open seat $4,500 Up to 20 managers per private cohort.

For the 50+ workforce

Next Chapter Cohorts

For companies parting with seasoned professionals who have more to offer. An employer-paid group cohort — a bridge from corporate employment to portfolio and independent work, and a dignified, novel alternative to the 1:1 outplacement default. Offered to employers as part of separation support.

Priced per cohort 10–15 participants, 12 weeks. Let's talk.

Method

Equal parts, by design.

Every engagement runs in six equal parts. Not a framework dropped on your desk — a designed process your team moves through, together.

1 · Designed inquiry

The questions come first. What are we actually solving, and who has to believe the answer?

2 · Quantitative research

The numbers that describe the business as it is — not as the deck says it is.

3 · Qualitative interviews

Your leadership team and one layer down, heard one at a time, candidly.

4 · Team building

Alignment is relational before it is strategic. The room has to trust itself.

5 · Facilitated workouts

Working sessions where disagreement surfaces, gets resolved, and becomes priority.

6 · Execution planning

The plan your team can recite, run, and own — without me in the room.

Without the plan, the work has no real value. So the plan is the definition of done.
OOrganization
MManagement
CCommunication
EExecution
The OMCE Method™ — four pillars, twelve modules, twenty years in the making.
The Leadership Operating System™

There is no operating manual for leading a team.
Now there is.

Great individual contributors get promoted to manager with zero training. They learn by osmosis, copy their old boss, and hope it works — and roughly 40% of newly-promoted managers are underperforming within 18 months, at an average replacement cost of about 1.5x salary. The Leadership Operating System™ is the program I'd have wanted handed to me: a 12-week cohort, built on the OMCE Method™, where every week ships a real deliverable to the participant's real team.

12weeks, twelve modules, twelve shipped deliverables
90minutes live with me each week, plus coach-led pods
15+peer operators in their phone book for the next 20 years
∞lifetime membership in the alumni community

Three layers, stacked

1 · Learn the system

One live 90-minute session per week with me — each walks through a module and the exercise the participant runs with their own team.

2 · Practice with coaches & peers

A dedicated cohort coach — a senior operator from my network — runs weekly pod breakouts where participants share what actually happened.

3 · Expand the network

Graduates leave with 15–20 peers running the same playbook at other companies — a network that compounds for decades.

Twelve weeks. Twelve deliverables.

OOrganization
  • Wk 1 · Organizational Design → StrengthsFinder team map
  • Wk 2 · Process Mapping → End-to-end workflow chart
  • Wk 3 · Stakeholder Development → Internal influencer map
MManagement
  • Wk 4 · Strategy & Visioning → Multi-level Plan to Win
  • Wk 5 · Goal & KPI Setting → PTW aligned to goals/KPIs
  • Wk 6 · Agenda Management → Disciplined recurring agenda
CCommunication
  • Wk 7 · Messaging → Team message map
  • Wk 8 · Communication Planning → Internal comms plan
  • Wk 9 · Calendaring → Working team calendar
EExecution
  • Wk 10 · Meetings & Events → Trimester meeting calendar
  • Wk 11 · Feedback Loops → Critical-feedback source map
  • Wk 12 · Best Practice Sharing → Team sensing capability

What the boss sees by Week 12

Direct reports report higher clarity and direction in pulse surveys. The manager stops firefighting and starts running a rhythm. The boss stops wondering whether the promotion was the right call. And graduation is the start, not the end — every graduate joins The Next Level Collective: monthly office hours with me, quarterly best-practice roundtables, a private alumni platform, and an annual in-person summit. Membership is for life.

For companies

Corporate Cohort — from $95,000

  • Private cohort, your company only — up to 20 managers
  • Customized to your operating model
  • HR/L&D progress reporting, pulse-survey deltas included
For individuals

Open Cohort — $4,500 per seat

  • 15–20 vetted participants across companies
  • Application-only admission
  • 12 live sessions, coach-led pods, lifetime alumni membership

Why now: AI is flattening organizations and reshuffling teams every 12–18 months — every manager is, effectively, a new manager again. The human-layer skills AI cannot replicate — judgment, trust, clarity, cohesion — are exactly the ones that separate managers who scale from managers who stall. OMCE compresses five years of on-the-job learning into twelve weeks of applied practice.

Request the full prospectus
The Capstone · In Every Engagement

Your team makes the art.

I have practiced photographic collage for more than twenty-five years. It is the other half of my working life — and it taught me something no consulting engagement ever did: a group of people composing one work must resolve every disagreement with their hands.

You cannot fake alignment in a collage. Every choice is visible, and every hand is in it.

Every alignment engagement — from the Day to the Trimester — closes with a collaborative photographic-collage capstone. Your leadership team — not me — composes a permanent work that becomes the physical record of its alignment, hung where the team works. It is my differentiator in the market: I searched the world for another practice where the leadership team makes the art. I did not find one.

The work and the process, in motion. Also available directly on Vimeo.

The practice behind the capstone

For more than twenty-five years I have photographed the places that hold an ordinary America together — the gas pump, the motel sign, the video store, the dollar store. Visual poetry from an ordinary America. Shot on 35mm film, developed as prints, and assembled entirely by hand in multiple passes — no digital compositing. A single photograph can only tell you what something looked like; photographs layered by hand can tell you what it felt like. Current series include Branded Memories and Japanese Tapestries — Tokyo and Kyoto at night on CineStill 800T film — with a Los Angeles exhibition targeted for 2026–27. The full portfolio lives at jasonbennettharris.com.

A memorable artifact — and a stronger team

The capstone is the rare opportunity most leadership teams never get: to make something permanent together. The same hands that argued the priorities compose the work — and the finished collage hangs where the team meets, a daily reminder of what was decided and who decided it. The alignment strengthens through the making:

CreativityHands make thinking visible. The room stops performing for the boss and starts composing with each other — and ideas surface that no agenda would have found.
VulnerabilityNo one outranks anyone at the collage table. Every placement is a visible choice, every choice can be moved by a colleague — and the team practices disagreeing safely, in miniature.
AuthenticityThe artifact cannot be faked or delegated. It records what the team actually agreed on — which is why it holds authority on the wall long after the offsite notes are forgotten.

The mechanism is studied: a 2024 peer-reviewed metasummary of 31 empirical studies (Behavioral Sciences) found art-based methods significantly enhance reflective practice, higher-order cognition, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal competency in leadership development.

About

A senior operator in the room — not just a facilitator.

Jason Bennett Harris
Jason Bennett Harris · Los Angeles

Early to every wave. As part of my range, I have been an early adopter of technology and its application to business growth — from the front lines of Internet 1.0 as Marketing Manager at FastWeb.com, to leading the two-year build of McDonald's first corporate intranet, replacing paper-based systems with aligned digital communication and e-learning across every franchisee and restaurant, to Exelon's internal innovation team, MxD — the nation's digital manufacturing innovation center — and CartoFront's real-time climate-risk data platform. Why it matters now: in a transformational time of AI systems and data, that experience helps leadership teams align, prioritize, and decide — producing greater value, ROI, and bottom-line growth.

Corporate Complexity

Thirteen years within McDonald's Corporation, building the field communications infrastructure that aligned 22 regional offices, 2,500 franchisees, and 14,000 restaurants to a single brand transformation. As Fortune 100 consultant, three year advisory engagement with CIO at Exelon, to build out an innovation practice – from team funding to implementation to millions of dollars of value creation.

Startup Scaling

At MxD (UI LABS), $80M raised from a dozen Fortune 100s — including GE, Rolls-Royce, and P&G — aligning the DoD, the State of Illinois, and a dozen universities under one operating vision. As President of CartoFront, led a venture-backed InsurTech platform, through its seven-year build and acquisition by Green Shield Risk Solutions.

My Unique Value Proposition

Most senior advisors are built for one environment. My range spans both. Thirteen years at McDonald's taught me scale, alignment and orchestration; the fifteen since taught me to build with design thinking, connecting data points, and adaptive maneuvering. I have sat on your side of the table — which is why my practice is delivered with generosity, vulnerability, and authenticity.

The person you meet is the person who does the work — no leverage pyramid, no handoff to associates. When an engagement calls for a second pair of hands, I bring in a vetted senior operator from my own network, under my method and my accountability: one principal, one point of responsibility. And because every engagement ends with your team owning the plan, continuity is designed in — the work is built to outlast me.

Green Shield / CartoFrontPresident · through acquisition
JBH Consulting, Inc.President · 2011 – present · Chicago / Los Angeles
McDonald's CorporationDirector, US Field Communications · 1998 – 2011
Museum of Science and Industry, ChicagoPublic Relations Manager · 1993 – 1996
M.S. Communications, Northwestern UniversityB.A. Economics, University of Illinois
Download the CV (PDF)
Before you hire anyone

Useful, whether or not we work together.

The three questions I'd ask first Can every member of your leadership team state the #1 priority in one sentence — the same sentence? Who owns each priority, by name? What did your team stop doing last quarter? If those answers come easily, you may not need me.
The honest fit test I take engagements where the leader is genuinely seeking alignment — not an endorsement of a decision already made. If what you need is a big-firm team, a longer runway, or a different specialty, I'll say so in the First Conversation and suggest where to look.
Your Complimentary Conversation Forty-eight minutes, no prep, no deck, no obligation — and afterward, a one-and-one-half-page memo of what I heard. Everything communicates, and this call is an example of how I work. If it's useful, we talk about working together. If not, you've invested an hour well and gained a question or two.
The Initial Conversation

Tell me what you're walking into.

We begin with the First Conversation — 48 minutes, by design. Long enough to get into the meat of the real alignment issues. Short enough to leave you room to transition to whatever's next on your calendar.

No preparation required, no obligation attached — just bring the one priority that's stuck, as it actually is, and I'll bring my full attention. No slides and no pitch: the conversation runs like the first 48 minutes of an engagement, in confidence. It will be a great — and grateful — investment of both of our time. Afterward, you'll receive a one-and-one-half-page memo: “What I heard from our conversation.”

What you said, what I noticed, and the two or three questions I'd pursue next to help you and your organization. It's yours to keep, whether or not we go further. Everything communicates — and this initial engagement is an example of how I work:

OpenListeningReflectiveAdaptiveGuiding
Book Your Complimentary Conversation
jasonbennettharris@gmail.com · 1.630.240.8213 · LinkedIn