Consultant and Speaker

Ann Latham is  the founder of Boston area consulting firm Uncommon Clarity®, Inc. Her clients represent over 40 industries and range from for-profit organizations, such as Boeing, Medtronic, and Hitachi, to nonprofit organizations as diverse as Public Television, United Way, and colleges and universities.

Ann has  been interviewed and has been written about in 85 media sources, including The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes, Inc., and Management Today, and many podcasts.

Ann is a frequent speaker and has delivered keynotes and workshops to thousands of executives, managers, employees, and MBA students at the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of Management and Springfield College as a guest lecturer. Of Ann’s speaking, Ideas Are Free coauthor and Isenberg School of Management professor, Alan G. Robinson says: “Ann Latham is one of the best business speakers I have heard. She is very experienced, the quality of her thinking is extremely high, and she knows how to deliver her message in an entertaining, concise, and convincing way.”

Ann combines the rigor of her academic background in mathematics (Tufts University) with her experiential knowledge advising corporate leaders on strategy, productivity, team effectiveness, and complex decision-making. Her leap from solving technical problems to solving the broader problems that involve people, commitment, and confidence was a transformation not unlike that discussed in her book, The Power of Clarity.  And it is akin to the leap organizations and leaders must make from focusing on physical processes to making cognitive processes a priority and acquiring the tools and skills currently missing in organizations of all types and sizes.

Publications

Ann Latham's two most recent books, The Power of Clarity: Unleash the True Potential of Workplace Productivity, Confidence, and Empowerment and The Disconnect Principle: Eliminate difficult conversations with clarity and empathy, along with an earlier book, The Clarity Papers: The Executive's Guide to Clear Thinking and Better, Faster Results, explain how to transform an organization so everyone can contribute their very best with confidence while leading the company to better results in far less time.

Uncommon Meetings: 7 Quick Tips for Better Results in Half the Time, also by Ann is quite popular because it contains seven uncommon tips guaranteed to make your meetings short and powerful.

In addition, Ann has published over 500 hundred articles and is an expert blogger for Forbes.com.

Career

Ann Latham demonstrated her natural clarity early in her career by earning a degree in mathematics from Tufts University and then developing a reputation for writing bug-free software in high-tech companies. She is responsible for the communications software that synchronized the many control centers responsible for the generation and transmission of electric power for all of Great Britain. She developed products, including the first with remote test monitoring capability over the Internet, for a company that made large computer controlled hydraulic testing systems for use in everything from testing materials to simulating earthquakes to shaking and breaking vehicles. She helped another company improve its ability to make airplane components by melting titanium powder with a laser beam using a process called laser additive manufacturing.

Ann's last two corporate positions led naturally to consulting. In the first, she reported to the CEO and led the company's most challenging cross-functional and cross-divisional efforts to set strategy and make operational improvements. In the second, she shifted to an R&D subsidiary where she got involved in every aspect of their business: working closely with customers, digging into their financials, determining the true costs of their products, obtaining AS9100 quality certifications (ISO on steroids), improving processes, managing change, and managing a diverse assortment of employees.

In 2004, Latham became an independent consultant so she could take her talents to many companies and increase her ability to have a significant positive impact. Before quitting her job, Ann asked numerous colleagues what it was that she did exceptionally well that was most unusual. The responses all pointed to the same thing and she named her company Uncommon Clarity® based on those answers.

Initially, Ann focused on improving client operations, but soon realized that the strategic clarity and alignment essential for success often needed more attention than operations. She quickly changed her  focus to include strategy and alignment.

Ann's consulting and writing evolved from giving advice and bringing her own natural clarity to complex situations to teaching others how to create their clarity themselves. Showing people how to create clarity quickly became her passion. She knew that clarity offered an enormous opportunity to improve performance and her consulting was the perfect way to practice and prove her methods. This passion drives her writing, especially her books, The Power of Clarity, The Disconnect Principle, The Clarity Papers, and Uncommon Meetings. She is on a mission to make organizations, if not the world, a better place through greater cognitive clarity.

Personal 

Before joining the corporate world, Ann was reluctant to give up her freedom for all but two weeks of every year. So she chose seasonal labor instead: driving school buses, selling minnows and cleaning boats at a resort in northern Minnesota, teaching homebound teens with behavior challenges, developing and constructing educational games for elementary students, tutoring college students, and, in her most serious early commitment, teaching math and coaching soccer at two independent schools in New England. When one too many of her students asked why they needed to learn algebra and geometry, she decided it was time to find out. She took a Fortran course, gave up teaching, and landed her first corporate job. 

Upon leaving the corporate world, Ann saved only one of the many framed certificates she had received: “Most Likely to Dispute Recognized Authorities,” a good-humored acknowledgment of her constant questioning and challenging of assumptions. 

In addition to writing and consulting, Ann enjoys travel, sports, and outdoor activities.

She learned to ride the unicycle as a young teen so she could do something her big brothers couldn't. When one of them started learning to ride, she upped the ante by picking up  a 17 foot canoe and riding away. 

She took up ice hockey at age 42 when she got tired of watching her daughters have all the fun. (This, she adds, was a seriously humbling experience spent skating toward where the puck used to be.) 

Ann is an avid hiker and is often found on top of a summit in the White Mountains of New Hampshire - at least when she isn't hiking mountain hut to mountain hut in the Swiss Alps and the Dolomites or across Provence or in the Great Smokys,  Rockies, Tetons, or the mountains and high plateaus of Arizona.

Ann also enjoys alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.

Her most recent addiction is competitive pickleball, the fastest growing sport in the US.

Ann also enjoys quieter activities like watching wildlife and reading. 

She graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University with a degree mathematics.

After visiting 43 countries, 48 US states, and seven Canadian provinces, Ann makes her home in New Hampshire. However, a piece of her heart remains in the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area of Northern Minnesota where she has guided numerous wonderful canoe trips.