Executive coach, organization development consultant, author, leadership educator, and publisher.

Cliff helps leaders and organizations work with tensions that do not stay solved—so they can make wiser decisions, strengthen relationships, and sustain results over time.

He has spent more than 25 years working with leaders, teams, and organizations facing complexity, recurring tensions, and high-stakes change. His work is grounded in Polarity Thinking™ and the practical discipline of recognizing when a challenge is a problem to solve, an ongoing tension to leverage, or a choice requiring clear accountability.

Cliff is founder and president of Xperience LLC; partner and Chief Learning Officer at Polarity Partnerships; founder and publisher of XperienceIT Press; founder, emeritus, and senior fellow of the Polarities of Democracy Institute; faculty with George Mason University’s Coaching Academy; and adjunct faculty in American University’s KEY Executive Leadership Program.

Before founding Xperience, Cliff held senior learning and organization-development roles at the National Cooperative Bank and The Washington Post. His teaching, coaching, consulting, and writing now meet in a body of work about leadership, polarity, human development, the Tao Te Ching, and wiser decisions over time.

Cliff works from Washington, DC and Kayser Ridge in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where he gathers small groups for selected learning, certification, and retreat experiences.

Cliff has been in conversation with the Tao Te Ching for more than four decades. He is the author of It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching and the Guided Tao Series. These books are interpretive, lived encounters with the text—not scholarly translations from Classical Chinese.

Current free essays continue through Just Tao It and Wiser Decisions on Cliff’sNOTES. The books are published through XperienceIT Press.