Carol A. Gallagher, Ph.D.

Dr. Carol Gallagher is Managing Partner of the Alliance for Excellence, an international consulting firm specializing in executive coaching and team development. Since launching Alliance for Excellence in 2001, Carol has worked with many senior executives across numerous industries. Some of her clients include Capital One, Dignity Health, Disney, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, SC Johnson, Schwab, Stanley Tools, Sutter Health and the University of Hawaii.

Carol has written the best-selling book Going to the Top, depicting the critical success factors of corporate executives. She has been recognized for her expertise and unprecedented research by ABC, CBS, NBC, CBC as well as Oprah’s Cable Network. She has also been featured on National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications.

Prior to leading the Alliance for Excellence, Carol was a Senior Principal at CGI-American Management Systems, a $3.7 billion technology corporation. She was the executive responsible for their leadership development and change management practice as well as enjoyed hands on coaching and team development with many of CGI-AMS’s large clients.

Earlier, Carol was an IBM sales representative, responsible for selling mainframe computer systems to IBM's strategic accounts. She was consistently recognized for maintaining high customer satisfaction and developing strong client partnerships. (She even ran a marathon with one of her clients to prevent IBM from losing its first mainframe maintenance contract.) Her dedication to understanding client behavior eventually led to a career shift toward management psychology.

Before IBM, Carol served as a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs & Company on Wall Street, where she performed risk analysis and evaluated profit and loss for international trading portfolios. She was the international liaison determining profit ratios in their London, Tokyo, Toronto, and New York offices. Working on Wall Street, Carol became familiar with corporate investment strategies, gained a new appreciation for the complexities of managing a business, and developed her own capacity for managing stress by weathering the Crash of '87.

At the beginning of her career, Carol was a management consultant with Andersen Consulting (a.k.a. Accenture) in its London, New York City, and Dallas offices, where she integrated banking and brokerage clients' computer systems with their corporate objectives. While working with an international bank client, she successfully coordinated its trading (front-line sales), financial, and technology business units so they were linked to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Carol has a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, now Alliant International University, where she served nine years on their Board of Trustees as an officer, member of the Executive Committee, and Chair of the Nominating Committee. She is also a former Advisory Board Member of Wyndham International Hotels.