Bio: Patrick Seaton, President
Innovative Management Tools
Patrick Seaton's passion is helping people successfully manage change. He is the founder and president of Innovative Management Tools LLC (www.innovmgmt.com), a provider of creative solutions for helping organizations respond successfully to change events that include downsizings, restructurings, strategic growth initiatives, process re-engineering, and mergers and acquisitions.
Seaton's fascination with change management, particularly in larger organizations, can be traced back to his experiences with the former Best Power Company of Necedah, Wis., a provider of power protection services, where he was employed from 1998 to 1997. While holding various managerial and staff positions at the company, Seaton witnessed firsthand the effects and challenges of working in a dynamic growth organization, which frequently posted growth rates at the time of 30–50% annually.
Following his years at Best Power, Seaton's ideas and thoughts about change management gradually began to crystallize into product concepts. Seaton likes to point to the day when he heard a chance comment from a co-worker lamenting the fact of "wearing too many hats" as a watershed moment in his development as a change management catalyst.
This comment inspired Seaton to focus on the roles employees play in organizational change. "I started to think about ways for workers to better understand and more effectively approach the execution of their tasks," he says, in reflecting on the genesis of IMT and its founding concepts.
The chance comment eventually resulted in Seaton creating HATS, a task-management and workload distribution training activity. During the next two years, Seaton followed HATS with a succession of other training activities and products in areas including complex change preparation, priority management, and barrier identification and elimination. These developments culminated in the formal launching of Innovative Management Tools in July 2005.
When it comes to developing change management concepts and products that address a variety of needs in today's workplace, Seaton brings a rich background to the task. He has more than 15 years of corporate management experience in change management, process improvement, team building, and supervisory skills development. He has previously held positions in training, product management, international business development, and sales at Best Power and Renaissance Learning, a provider of K–12 monitoring and assessment software based in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.
Seaton also brings an international perspective to his work at IMT. He studied in France during his senior year of college as a Fulbright Scholar, and he has held corporate positions that have resulted in him taking on assignments in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Malaysia and Mexico. He is very aware of the impact of change on organizations both within the United States and abroad, and he has an especially keen understanding of the dynamics of change as they impact multinational companies.
In an article in the April 2004 issue of Training Magazine, John Espy, an e-learning consultant with Usertech/Canterbury, said that "if the organization is changing, then all of us need to reevaluate how and why we do things—helping each other back to basic values and customer needs." Patrick Seaton has founded a company based on mastering this principle. Today he is helping clients ranging from small businesses to large corporations manage change more meaningfully, productively and profitably.