I help organizations, and the people inside them, work through change that arrived uninvited. Lately that mostly means AI. Before it, a merger, a pandemic, and a workforce that had to relearn how to do its job.
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 for a workforce of thousands, then left to find out whether any of it survives contact with a business I have to fund myself. It mostly does. The parts that do not have been more instructive than the parts that do.
The work has been more consistent than my job titles suggest. A merger that put three universities in one room. A pandemic that sent an entire workforce home and then asked it to come partway back. 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 a technology arriving faster than most people can absorb it. Different rooms, one problem: helping people keep their footing through a change they did not ask for.
AI is where that problem is hardest right now, so it is where most of my attention goes. It is my dissertation and it is also my daily operating problem. But the underlying work is older than the technology and it will outlast this particular version of it.
What I bring to a team is unusual in one specific way. Most people who can facilitate a room full of skeptical executives have never built an agentic workflow. Most people who have built one cannot facilitate the room. I do both, and I have the scar tissue from doing them at the same time.
I emcee, I facilitate, I coach, and I officiate. A conference stage in front of a thousand people, a working session with reluctant managers, a garden where two people asked me to stand with them. The rooms change more than the work does.
I get hired to solve a problem, not to run a program. The problem is almost always the same underneath: capable people are stuck, and the thing keeping them stuck is rarely the thing everyone is talking about. Three shapes it usually takes.
Most AI rollouts fail on fear and status, not on tooling. I work with leaders on the human side of adoption: what people are protecting, what they are afraid of losing, and how to design the change so the answer is not "your judgment."
Designed and delivered a Human-Centered AI Leadership program for the executive team and full corporate staff of Canon Financial Services.
Programs that reach every level and survive the second year. I design for the manager who has forty minutes, not the one with a free afternoon, and I measure whether behavior moved rather than whether people liked it.
Built and launched Elevate, the first enterprise-wide leadership program at Strategic Education, reaching 300+ people leaders across every business unit and delivered internationally.
Mergers, restructures, and the reorganizations that follow a strategy shift. The work is rarely the plan. It is holding two cultures in the room long enough to build one that people will actually join.
Led the cross-institutional talent integration through the Capella, Strayer, and Torrens combinations, aligning leadership practice across three university cultures on two continents.
It did not exist before I built it. The first enterprise-wide leadership development program at a publicly traded education company, designed from scratch and delivered internationally to cross-functional cohorts of 300+ people leaders across every business unit.
Built for the skeptics, not the converts. An AI adoption program for the executive leadership team and the full corporate staff, covering what responsible adoption asks of a leader before it asks anything of a tool.
Two continents, three institutional cultures. Selected to lead the cross-institutional talent integration through the mergers and acquisition, aligning leadership practice across universities that had every reason to keep doing it their own way.
The research, running on my own payroll. Founded a services business and built its AI-augmented operating model myself: client settlement reporting, month-end reconciliation, cash forecasting, and marketing, run by a lean team. Here is exactly what runs, and what I turned off.
Also: founded and facilitated the first Leadership Community of Practice at Strategic Education, connecting roughly 700 people leaders across all business units. Led enterprise talent strategy through the pivot to fully online operations and the hybrid model that followed. Co-chaired the CEO's Council on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Delivered 500+ HBDI cognitive profile debriefs and certified DiSC and emotional intelligence programs.
Doctor of Business Administration candidate in Strategy and Innovation at Capella University, expected 2027. My dissertation asks how mid to senior leaders understand and enact human-centered values, including creativity, learning, and well-being, when they integrate generative AI into the work. Qualitative inquiry, constructivist paradigm.
I founded and run Blue Moon Estate Sales Orlando West, helping families through estate settlement, downsizing, and relocation. It runs on an AI-augmented operating model I designed and built myself, covering client reporting, reconciliation, cash forecasting, and marketing. It is the closest thing I have to a laboratory, and it does not grade on a curve. I keep an open record of the agents I actually run, and the ones I shut off. Member, American Society of Estate Liquidators, and active in three Central Florida chambers of commerce.
Executive education and leadership workshops through Paint It Black Design Group. Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach, Speaker and Trainer. HBDI and Everything DiSC certified practitioner. I emcee conferences, coach leaders one to one, and officiate weddings, which are three versions of the same job. I co-host the Thought Partners Podcast with Ed Buchanan, who also produces it, on strategy, leadership, and human-centered design.
You are hiring. Director-level talent development, leadership development, AI enablement, or organizational effectiveness. Orlando or remote.
You are staffing a course. I taught as adjunct faculty at Rowan University for seven years and I am teaching again. Leadership, management, strategy, and first-year experience, on campus or online.
You have a workforce mid-transition and it is going sideways. Workshops, program design, and fractional leadership. This is the specific problem I study.