Jeff Winton
Vice President
TRADITIONAL BIO
Jeff has over 20 years of consulting and industry experience helping businesses leverage technology to drive innovation and growth across the utilities, healthcare, energy, oil & gas, retail, wholesale, and automotive industries. He is well versed in both strategic planning and tactical execution, enabling him to help companies establish a compelling vision and do what it takes to bring that vision to life. He has put these capabilities to use to help clients in numerous ways, including developing and implementing a customer experience strategy for a large utility company, a data management strategy for an automotive company, and enabling business process improvement and enterprise content management capabilities for multiple oil & gas companies. Jeff’s core skills include the delivery of complex technology solutions, evaluation, selection, and management of vendors, data management and analytics, customer experience strategy development and execution, and process optimization.
Before joining Thought Ensemble, Jeff worked as an independent consultant. Prior to going out on his own, Jeff held consulting positions at Sendero, Hitachi Consulting, and Stonebridge, while also gaining valuable industry experience working for the Dallas Cowboys as the IT Director of their merchandising business. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from the University of Oklahoma.
In his spare time, Jeff enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids, playing golf, traveling, and playing guitar. He also volunteers much of his time coaching youth baseball.
Strategic, Relator, Achiever, Focus, Competition
Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judging (ISTJ)
THOUGHTFUL BIO
I grew up playing sports and continue to be a huge sports fan. As a spectator, there is nothing that gets me more excited than watching college football (go Sooners!). But my main passion is baseball. It was the sport that I played throughout high school and now I am back into it as a coach of my son’s team. As a player, the drive to better your skills, be a better teammate, and win games is the primary motivation; you are in the middle of the action and, to a large degree, in control of the outcome. I have learned though that coaching requires a much different perspective. Coaching is about teaching the fundamentals, work ethic, and, most importantly, the mental approach to succeeding in what is known as a “game of failure.”
It wasn’t until later in life that I heard that term – a “game of failure.” Baseball is a game where even the greatest of hitters might fail 70% of the time. How that player deals with the failure is what differentiates them from the rest. In retrospect, this explains a lot about why I love the game so much and why I love being a consultant. Much of what we do as consultants is aimed at helping our clients achieve what they have never accomplished before. To take innovative ideas and make them a reality. To take risks that, by the very nature of doing so, are going to introduce opportunities to fail. We know this before we even start, but we prepare for it – both tactically and mentally. We pull from our prior experiences, best practices, and knowledge of the client’s business and industry to put together a strategy and plan that everyone can get behind. We put together a team of talented people, each with their own unique talents and skills. We come prepared to execute on a game changing idea for the business. And then, often, a curveball comes along (pun intended), and our response to that curveball will dictate the success of the entire effort.
I have spent the vast majority of my career in consulting and have developed my skills as both a player and a coach. What gets me out of bed every day is knowing that I have the opportunity to be part of a team that is innovating and making a difference for our clients and their customers. We are learning from each other, navigating challenges, dealing with failure, and, ultimately, celebrating success. It doesn’t get much better than that.