About Brandon Partners

Brandon Partners, headquartered in the redwoods that lay just over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley, provides corporate and public sector training, assessment and learning tools, instructor certification, keynote presentations, executive coaching, and applied behavioral sciences consulting to enhance performance and organizational results. The firm’s distinctive marketplace specialty is for learning solutions that cultivate the workplace competencies of Organizational and Interpersonal Savvy, Managerial Motivation skills, and Self-Motivation Skills.

We believe that the interpersonal dimension of organizational influence is vital, but ignores the equally important, and typically ignored strategic dimension of influence –– astuteness and skills for navigating and mastering four P’s: organizational Politics, Power dynamics, the role of Perception in how decisions are made in companies, and issues around the Promotion of one’s ideas, results, and accomplishments. Through direct delivery and our strategic alliances with other training companies around the world, we spread the increasingly vital leadership competency of Organizational Savvy.

Firm History

In 1998, our founder Rick Brandon, a thirty-year veteran in communication skills development, jumped when asked by a Fortune 10 bank client for a political savvy program aimed at managers at career turns. The population was technically skilled but “lacked senior level organizational savvy and upper level image and impact.”

Dr. Brandon funneled data from 20 years of derailment coaching with 1,300 executives who were either overly political or under-political into a cutting edge workshop on ethical organizational politics. The course became the bank’s “most popular leadership program,” and has since been taught for scores of blue-chip clients across a range of industries: financial services, health care, technology, biotech, utilities, manufacturing, service, retail, insurance, government, and higher education.

Soon, several clients urged Brandon to write Survival of the Savvy (Free Press, 2004), noting that too little material existed in the marketplace on this important competency. This straight-talking and practical book quickly made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, was called “the definitive book on political savvy” by Robert Eichinger, founder of the Lominger Career Architect, and earned endorsements by thought leaders Ken Blanchard, Marshall Goldsmith, Harvey MacKay, and many CEO’s. It was Book of the Month for the Institute for Management Studies, Fast Company magazine, and Forbes CEO.com, & was reviewed in Harvard Business Review, Library Journal, Business Book Reviews, Executive Book Summaries, and many articles. The book’s core model is regularly presented at The Conference Board, American Society of Training and Development, the Institute for Management Studies (18 cities in 2005, the most requested program) and many companies’ Leadership Forums.

Our Clients

Our Strategic Partners

Brandon Partners is proud of our learning partnerships with a number of Affiliate Consultant training firms. most of which license our intellectual property courseware for use with their own clients. These resellers of Organizational Savvy or Straight Talk for Accountability and Results have been certified to deliver these programs, and/or hire Dr. Rick Brandon to present.