What We Do
Our Clients
Remember we said our founder is an artist at heart? Van Gogh said “How difficult it is to be simple.” Leonard da Vinci said “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” These quotes hang above Annette’s desk.
Leadership Development & Coaching
Campaign & Initiative Management
Special Publication Management
Communications
Innovative Thought-Leadership
Change Management
Strategic & Business Planning
Writing
Organizational Advancement
What Inspires Us
California Institute of Technology
Child360/LAUP
Gen2GenLA
Jumpstart
LA Area Chamber of Commerce
Pomona Unified School District
Stanford University
United Way of Greater Los Angeles
University of Utah, Sorenson Impact Center
University of Southern California
Unite-LA
Contact
MissionLab
Consulting
please contact us! We look forward to hearing from you.
With any project, initiative or planning process, we start with the visual of a 4-legged stool. The top of the stool is the mission. It holds the whole thing together and makes it work. The four legs are the answers to these basic questions—
• Where have you been?
• Where are you now?
• Where do you want to be?
• How will you get there?
We help organizations, and individuals, answer, and keep answering these questions. If the constant flow of answers always leads up to the mission, you have something that’s really solid.
A Four Legged-Stool
Let us begin by saying, we like visuals.
They are terrific teaching tools and will help you understand how we work. Annette Ricchiazzi, our principle consultant, uses them all the time. You will get used to it. An artist at heart, she founded MissionLab Consulting in 2017 after many years as both a consultant and an organizational leader in Los Angeles. She also spent almost 10 years as the owner of a small retail business where she learned that complicated ideas and highly sophisticated approaches often don't keep the lights on. And the clear result of the lights going off is . . . you are in the dark! The simplest way between two points is to put on your shoes and just move from one point to the other. As she evolved this archaic theory of change, she often found herself involved with organizations that were trying to tackle difficult problems by considering difficult solutions. Two negatives don’t always equal a positive. People sometimes feel like they are finding their way in the dark and getting knocked around. Could there be a better way? Discovering, or creating, the most concise and simple answers is what MissionLab strives to bring to each project.
Who We Are
How We Do Our Work:
The laB
We came into being because we visualized what happens in a lab. A lab is a place where you explore, test and get results that were originally inspired by a hypothesis. The mission of any organization is like a hypothesis. MissionLab was founded on the idea that mission should drive decision-making and those decisions should eventually create outputs that lead to results. If all this is done in a thoughtful, efficient, informed and smart way, those results can be very powerful.
Often this simple methodology is lost in the complexity of today's organizations and the enormity of our societal challenges — and also because we are human and things sometimes just get messy. But does it have to be that way? The value we add to the crowded consultant space is the simplicity with which we help clients get results no matter what the task is.
Two Trains
The visual for our business philosophy, whether it be for our own work or that of others, is based on the image of two trains running.
There is the one you are on and the one you want to be on. You need to keep up with the one you want to be on and be ready to cross the platform when the time is right. Sometimes you have to build the platform in order to cross it. After you get onto that other train, there will be another train running next to it. In this scenario, you are always going forward, always looking ahead, always preparing, and always trying to improve the journey in order to end up at a better destination. The destination is your mission. You should always be moving toward it.