"I don't need to be out in front of an organization," says Craig, ADG's COO. "I find my greatest satisfaction in serving behind the scenes, making sure everything operates efficiently." In other words, he is the perfect complement to Jeff Antkowiak, he's not the face of the company or the charisma that captures hearts and minds, but he's the organizational force that corrals the generated passion of the workforce and makes it most effective. "One of the organizations where I worked before coming here was Allegis Group. I helped improve a company that had about $3 billion in revenue and more than 300 U.S. locations. But the principals of good leadership, organization development, and employee relations are the same everywhere." In VanBrackle's first job out of college he was a 22-year-old asked to manage "a lot of people who had been at the company longer than I was alive." more »

That firm was an old-school manufacturing plant where they could see the efficiencies of modern ideas, but didn't want to change anyway. So I learned early on that a "servant leadership" style was much more effective for me than being an autocrat. At ADG, he's the veteran certain of what it takes to get the job done. "Take the visionary's ideas, and make a well-run, profitable organization out of them," he says. "It's the same everywhere." « back