Who's the Coach?

Hi there! 

It's me, Dan Clapper.  I am the coach at Cogent Language, this boutique multinational firm offering people doing project work opportunities to do it as a visual, collaborative practice.

I  grew up in the US Southwest of the 1950's, in a suburb of Phoenix, filling up mostly with white folks, like my family, surrounded by deserts, indigenous peoples, the Hoover Dam, and the fields it began to water, worked mostly by braceros from Mexico. 

When I was twelve, we moved to California, down the peninsula from San Francisco, into the then very diverse town of Mountain View. I came of age there, a neighbor of Steve Jobs, in the heart of what would soon become "Silicon Valley".

After graduating Stanford Phi Beta Kappa, I began to work in intercultural education and training.  In some of the top organizations in that field, I was fortunate enough to land key roles as a young man, doing, at the same time, graduate work in Cybernetic Systems and in Education. By mid-career, having worked in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Boston, I was leading the design of instructional systems in more than a dozen countries. 

In 2004, I was invited by the US Department of Defense and The University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) to present on the post-9/11 future of US training in languages and intercultural education. 

In 2005, I launched this company, Cogent Language, as a US limited liability company (LLC) under Arizona law.  There and then, my main clients were US and Asia Pacific multinational firms. My only offering was pure consulting on global business communication and human resource development.

After a series of successful engagements in Japan, I opened a branch of Cogent Language in Tokyo in 2007 and began working there steadily with Japanese and global companies. While my main stock in trade continued to be advice to decision-makers on human resource development, I also began providing training to managers on project management.  

While  demand for these corporate services has continued, in the last few years, I have become less interested in working through managers, HR administrators, executives, and lawyers, amd more interested in serving individuals directly, as a coach.  

Thus, the current line of Cogent Language business is coaching and career education enabling individuals and teams to start where they are and to grow their own project management practice, fit to their realities and to their ideals.