AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO OUR CLIENTS, PAST AND PRESENT
It has been our very distinct honor to have had the opportunity to work with you and many other committed and far-sighted boards over the past many years in our shared passion to elevate governance to new levels. Our relationship has been couched in mutual respect for and confidence in each other, and we hope our work together has resulted in the promise of enhanced governance performance that motivated us both.
AGI was legally formed in 1993, making this venture a 30-year commitment for us. Since AGI’s formation, we have had the good fortune to have worked with boards in most of the states and with others in seven countries on three Continents. It has been the dream ride of a lifetime.
But nothing lasts forever. We have seen the inevitability of accumulated years as they have come and gone, ever more rapidly and consequential each year. One of our greatest fears has been that when the end of the road occurs for both of us, AGI simply goes away. We selfishly believe that the work we have done for 30 years has some value worth maintaining, and have hoped that the product of that work will outlast either of us. Saying it simply: we have been very concerned about succession and whether AGI and Coherent Governance might live beyond “Linda and Randy.”
We are very pleased to announce that, yes, indeed it will. After extended discussions and a fair amount of give-and-take, we have reached agreement with the Center for Educational Effectiveness (CEE) in Bellevue, WA, to purchase AGI and make it a significant part of CEE’s portfolio of services for school boards and districts. CEE is a larger company, originally created to help school districts improve in a variety of ways their effectiveness in meeting student needs. Its focus and reach since have expanded, and this entry into the governance field will add a significant new dimension to CEE’s menu of services for districts.
How did all this come about? It began in 2017 when we did a CG project for the Evergreen School Board in Vancouver, WA. Evergreen’s superintendent at the time was Dr. John Steach. We knew when we met John that he was a different breed. He is a former two-term school board member who started his working career as an engineer, then migrated to the field of education administration because of his passion for kids. But he never lost his ability to look at situations and problems through the eyes of an engineer. To him, the logic behind CG made perfect sense, as did the sequential processes that needed to be created to make it work from an organizational viewpoint. It was a hand-in-glove fit.
Shortly after our work with John in Evergreen, he left the superintendency to accept his current position as Chief Executive Officer of CEE. CEE’s reach into multiple districts appealed to John. If he could apply sound logic to administrative leadership in one district, why not do the same in many districts?