Our principal partners and lead facilitators are established experts and highly credible management consultants with extensive backgrounds in military history, corporate management and leadership, and in organizational development consulting.

Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, Founding and Principal Partner, Lead Facilitator

Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, , United States Army (Retired), is a thirty-year infantry veteran who commanded at the platoon, company, and battalion level. A graduate of the University of Dayton (OH) in 1971, he served in a variety of military assignments, culminating in his tenure as full professor of history and chief of military history at the U S Military Academy at West Point. Colonel Kingseed holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and a Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College.

A New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters (Berkley Caliber, 2006), Colonel Kingseed also has authored these meaningful texts: Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956 (LSU Press, 1995), The American Civil War (Greenwood Press, 2004), From Omaha Beach to Dawson’s Ridge (Naval Institute Press, 2005), Old Glory Stories (Naval Institute Press, 2006), thirty-eight articles on leadership, and 250 book reviews.

Cole now serves as a private leadership consultant and a Founder and Partner of Battlefield Leadership. His clients have included General Electric, Freddie Mac, Heller Financial, International Paper, Merrill Lynch, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Progressive Insurance, Target Corporation, National Association of Independent Schools, General Mills, Home Depot, and PHH-Avral.

Richard E. Thomas, Founding and Principal Partner, Lead Facilitator

Richard E. Thomas is a culture change and organizational effectiveness expert with extensive experience as an executive in consumer package goods and cable television industry companies, and with over 25 years of organizational and executive development consulting work with Fortune 500 companies. In addition to serving as a Founder and Partner in Battlefield Leadership, Thomas was formerly a partner in charge of governance, leadership and management for an innovative outpatient surgery center development and management company with properties in several states, and was CEO of the Outpatient Surgery Center of Hilton Head in South Carolina.

From 1992 until 2001, Rich was President and CEO of the Millennium Consulting Group, Inc, a New Jersey-based firm whose executive and team development work concentrated on leadership behavior as a primary leverage point in managing strategic change. Millennium’s clients included such leading global companies as: American Express, AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Disney, Du Pont, Eli Lilly, HBO, Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers, Lever Brothers, Merrill Lynch, MetLife, Pfizer,  SmithKline-Beecham, Time Warner, UBS, Warner-Lambert and Weyerhauser. Earlier, Mr. Thomas was a partner in the Maryland-based Renaissance Leadership, Inc, and has held executive positions with QVC Network, Comcast Cable Communications, Home Box Office (HBO), Canada Dry International, and PepsiCo.

Rich holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Asian Studies with special concentration in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University, and has completed graduate field work in primitive tribal culture with Thammasat University (Thailand). A Vietnam veteran and former Army Intelligence/Psy Ops agent in Special Operations, he speaks the Mandarin dialect of Chinese and Thai. As a lifelong learner and longtime military history buff, Thomas is an accomplished historian and Civil War and WW II scholar in his own right.