I help organizations, and the people inside them, work through change that arrived uninvited. Lately that mostly means AI.
Leadership development · Talent strategy · AI enablement
Executive education · Organizational effectiveness · Faculty
Paul Tonden, MBA
DBA candidate, Strategy & Innovation
I spent a decade building leadership programs inside a publicly traded education company. Then I built a company of my own and went back to school to study the thing I kept running into.
The through-line has been steadier than my job titles suggest. A merger. A pandemic. First-year students who had not yet learned how to be students. Families standing in a parent's house deciding what to keep. And now AI, arriving faster than most people can absorb it.
Different rooms, same problem. Helping people keep their footing through a change they did not ask for.
Emceeing the annual executive leadership conference at Strategic Education.
I get hired to solve a problem, not to run a program. Three shapes it usually takes.
AI adoption is a leadership problem dressed up as a technology problem. Rollouts stall on fear and status, not on tooling.
Programs that reach every level and survive the second year. Built for the manager with forty minutes, not the one with a free afternoon.
Mergers, restructures, and the reorganizations that follow a strategy shift. The work is rarely the plan.
Most recently: a human-centered AI leadership workshop for the executive team and full corporate staff at Canon Financial Services, designed for the skeptics rather than the early adopters. Happy to tell you the longer version over coffee.
Strategy and Innovation at Capella, expected 2027. My dissertation asks how leaders hold onto human-centered values when they bring generative AI into the work.
Blue Moon Estate Sales Orlando West, helping families through estate settlement, downsizing, and relocation. It runs on an AI operating model I built myself, which makes it a decent laboratory and a demanding one. Here is what actually runs, and what I turned off.
Associate faculty at Post University, after seven years at Rowan University earlier in my career. Leadership, management, strategy, and first-year experience.
I emcee conferences, facilitate workshops and offsites, coach leaders one to one, and officiate weddings. Two of those this fall, September and November. Maxwell Leadership certified coach, speaker and trainer, certified in Maxwell DISC, and an HBDI practitioner. I also co-host the Thought Partners Podcast with Ed Buchanan. What I speak on, and what it costs.
The rooms change more than the work does.
An organization whose people were handed AI and did not change how they work. The licenses got bought, the tools got rolled out, and six months later the work looks the same. Five hundred employees and up, where the people being asked to change are the employees rather than the customers. That is the problem I want next, and I will take it as a seat on a team or as an engagement. Remote or Central Florida both work. I am here permanently, running a business in Winter Garden, so on-site is genuinely on the table.
An organization mid-transition. A merger, a restructure, a wave of newly promoted managers who are drowning. Someone who suspects the tooling is not the problem.
A department chair staffing a course. Leadership, management, strategy, or first-year experience. On campus or online.
A room that needs someone in front of it. A conference that needs an emcee, an offsite that needs a facilitator, a leadership session, or a wedding. I have two booked for this fall. It is a real channel and I like the work.
A family facing a house full of a life. That one is Blue Moon. Different phone number, still me.
The people usually worth an introduction are chief people officers, heads of talent or learning, chiefs of staff, and whoever owns an AI program that has quietly stalled. A useful introduction is short: a name, one sentence about the problem they described, and permission to share my email. One warm introduction into a real problem is worth more than any number of forwarded links. And if you are simply curious what I am working on, that counts too.
If you hear someone say any of this, that is the introduction. We bought the licenses and nobody uses them. We rolled out the tools and nothing changed. Our people are scared of this and we are pretending they are not. We are merging and the cultures are not fusing. We promoted a wave of new managers and they are drowning.