About Cogent Language & Me
Hi there!
It's me, Dan Clapper. I am the coach at Cogent Language, this boutique multinational offering you the chance to start where you are and grow your own project know-how.
A good way to introduce myself is by saying that I grew up with Steve Jobs as a neighbor. When I was twelve, my family moved to California. We settled down the peninsula from San Francisco in the then very diverse town of Mountain View. There, Steve and I went to the same junior high, in the heart of what would soon become "Silicon Valley". Though we were not classmates, I soon got to know him very well – by way of his products, his company, and his story.
We both came from middle-class families living in the suburbs near Stanford University, where Steve would later speak as CEO of Apple and Pixar. My family could not afford to send me there, but luckily I won enough scholarship money to go. After graduating Stanford Phi Beta Kappa, I found work in intercultural education and training. In those dynamic new fields, something that really helped was getting one of the first Macintosh computers that Steve and company produced, way back in 1984. I was also fortunate enough to land key roles in some of the top organizations in international training. To grow my own know-how for them, I earned graduate degrees in Education and Cybernetic Systems.
In the 1990's, I got the chance to work in Boston and Tokyo, as an education and training manager. By mid-career, I was working as a key consultant to a Fortune #1 company of the time, informing their instructional system design projects for HR development in more than a dozen countries.
In 2004, I was invited by the US Department of Defense and The University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) to present on the post-9/11 future of US training in languages and intercultural education.
In 2005, I launched this company, Cogent Language, as a US limited liability company (LLC) under Arizona law. There and then, my main clients were US and Asia Pacific multinational firms. My only offering was pure consulting on global business communication and human resource development.
After a series of successful engagements in Japan, I opened a branch of Cogent Language in Tokyo in 2007 and began working there steadily with Japanese and global companies. While my main stock in trade continued to be advice to decision-makers on human resource development, I also began providing training to managers on project management.
While demand for these corporate services has continued, in the last few years, I have become less interested in working through managers, HR administrators, executives, and lawyers, amd more interested in serving individuals directly, as a coach.
Thus, the current line of Cogent Language business is coaching and career education enabling individuals and teams to start where they are and to grow their own project management practice, fit to their realities and to their ideals.
"Dan greatly propelled a key project when he provided consulting to my team on building a collaborative High Performance Organization in Clinical Research. In particular he intoduced new (to us) thinking on Communities of Practice and Organizational Learning in combination with performance management that recognizes what he framed for us Account-building Communicative Tasks (ACTs)."
