OUR TEAM

Todd Thaxton is Director at Centerprising. In this capacity, he leads strategic planning, engagement, and constituency building with focus on family enterprises. Previously, he served as Executive Director, Global Partnerships and Development at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

Thaxton is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and serves on its Homeland Security and China Committees. He is a member of the Milken Institute Young Leaders Circle. He holds his MPA from Columbia University with a focus on energy policy and international finance. Both his MBA and BA are from the University of Southern California.

Dr. Rogan was a flag bearer for the Austrian Olympic Team.
He was an Olympic swimmer who competed in the 2000 (Syndey), 2004 (Athens), 2008 (Beijing) and 2012 (London) Olympic Games– winning Gold and Silver medals.

Markus was the director of sport psychology for the Brazilian Olympic Team in 2016. The team won the most medals in the history of their country. After graduating from Stanford University, Markus spent three years at UCLA’s department of psychology researching performance psychology. He was then the director of a residential depression and addiction rehab center before starting his private practice in Beverly Hills, CA. He currently works with Athletes, corporate executives, and rising generation from families of wealth on performance therapies.

Dr. Scott Dr. Cynthia Scott has over 20 years of experience as a coach and consultant with a broad range of organizations in the US and abroad. She is the former West Regional Change Practice Leader at Towers Perrin and the founder of Changeworks, a San Francisco-based organizational consulting firm. She played a leadership role for the global design team at Deloitte and Touche, which produced the change management methodology and tools for SAP implementation.

Her book Getting Your Organization to Change contains the basic architecture and tools that address the underlying behavioral and organizational changes that work to reduce resistance and increase engagement.

Kathryn McCarthy is currently a Consultant to Families and Family Offices. She is a Director of the Rockefeller Trust Company (NY) and serves on its Audit Committee. Kathryn has over 25 years’ experience in advising wealthy families and managing family offices and other entities. She was the founding President of Marujupu, LLC – the family office of the Sulzberger Family (The New York Times Company) and started their multigenerational family office. She was also a member of the Board of Directors, the Investment Committee and the Manager of the Sulzberger Foundation.

Dr. Jim Grubman has provided services to families of wealth for over 30 years. His work with clients has earned him a reputation as a valued family advisor. Jim often is consulted in situations of complexity where psychology, law, finance, medicine and business all come into play to varying degrees. He draws on his experience as a psychologist, neuropsychologist, and family business consultant with specialty interests in trusts and estate law, family governance, and wealth psychology.
Jim is the author of Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations and co-author with Dennis Jaffe, PhD of Cross Cultures: How Global Families Negotiate Change Across Generations, ground-breaking explanations of how individuals and families can adjust to wealth effectively. His work has been discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath, and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Private Wealth magazine.

For over 40 years, Dr. Jaffe has been one of the leading architects of the field of family enterprise consulting. As both an organizational consultant and clinical psychologist, he helps multi-generational families to develop governance practices that build the capability of next generation leadership and ensure ongoing capability of financial organizations and family offices to serve their family clients.
Dr. Jaffe is aFamily Business Scholar at the Smith Family Business Initiative at Cornell University, a faculty advisor at the Ultra High New Worth Institute, a regular contributor to Forbes Leadership channel. For 35 years, he was professor of Organizational Systems and Psychology at Saybrook University in San Francisco, He received his B.A. in Philosophy, M.A. in Management and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University.

Vip Vyas is the founding Director of Distinctive Performance and has over 25 years international experience in impacting the performance of major multi-billion dollar CAPEX projects in the Oil & Gas and Infrastructure Sectors.

His global experience includes: Australia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Cameroon, France, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India Italy, Japan, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States and UK.

Vip has particular expertise in building High Performance Alliances, Joint-Ventures and Strategic Consortia where performance depends on building collaborative environments that satisfy a diverse range of stakeholder interests in complex settings.