Loretta Donovan

  The founder and president of the Worksmarts Group, Loretta has interwoven a passion for exploring the human spirit with an understanding of how organizations learn and create value.  Drawing from a wealth of experience as an executive, consultant, and learner, she blends participatory approaches aimed at dialogue, knowledge creation and critical action with web-based technologies to increase the capacity of organizations to plan and implement business processes, strategic initiatives, and enterprise systems. 

Her extraordinary background includes serving as chief learning officer at Girl Scouts of the USA, where Loretta orchestrated training for the implementation of the GEMMA enterprise technology across the country, and led the integration of Appreciative Inquiry within the corporate consulting team.  Previously, she held senior learning and consulting positions at ClientSoft, Inc., Sungard/SCT, and the March of Dimes.  She is a contributor to The AMA Handbook of E-Learning: The Effective Design, Implementation, and Technology Solutions. She has consulted, written, and developed and delivered courses on virtual teams, facilitation and e-learning design.

Loretta is currently a faculty member at New York University-SCPS where she teaches courses in appreciative inquiry, business process management and assessment.  At Teachers College/Columbia University, she teaches an appreciative inquiry course, titled Innovations in Business Through a Positive Lens,  with Bernard Mohr, and has taught Staff Development and Training and Leading, and Sustaining Web-based Learning online, and served on the faculty of the 2002 Workplace Learning Institute.   

She is a doctoral candidate in Adult and Organizational Learning at Teachers College/Columbia University. Loretta is a member of the Society for Organizational Learning, the Academy of Management, the Human Capital Institute, and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation.  She is a co-owner in Appreciative Inquiry Consulting and has been an associate of MG Taylor.

In her spare time, Loretta is chair of the Career Grants Committee for National AAUW,on the steering team for the Women’s Leadership Circle of the AARP Foundation, and on the National Advisory Board, Stanford University, Educational Leadership Institute. With husband, John, she sails the Temerarious, a Pearson Triton, out of City Island, NY when fair winds blow.

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