Alan Hurwitz Associates

Specialties

AHA helps companies, non-​profits, and government organizations, and their leaders and followers function at their most effective level. Work may involve executive coaching, strategic planning, strengthening the overall design, systems, teams, and/​or culture.

This involves helping leaders diagnose and address anything in the way of full success, We specialize in getting to and through the most complex and hard-​to-​grasp barriers to productivity, effective communication, solid morale, and other critical factors.

A special focus is working with individuals and groups from different economic sectors, cultures, and countries — more than 40 and counting so far. The core of our approach is developing close relationships with clients that enable them to talk openly about their situations, be really understood, and guided by critical questions, discover approaches, «levers» as we call them, that they never knew existed, and directions to fully successfutures they may not have even imagined.

History

Established in 1988.

After several years directing a training program for the State of Massachusetts, AHA Principal, Alan Hurwitz, began to take outside clients, that then becoming the focus of his work. He tells of young professionals asking, «What do you need to become a consultant?» The flip, but accurate answer, «A client willing to pay you for helping them with something they think you can.

Later, after a doctoral program, consulting focused increasingly on helping organizations to be really effective. As Dr. Hurwitz puts it, «Training alone assumes people don’t know what to do. Typically, they do know that; but they feel their leadership and organizations don’t let them do it.»

After a few years some clients expressed a preference for working with a firm, rather than an individual, at the same time he began collaborating with other senior people on large projects, and AHA was born. Have you noticed that this acronym (AHA) spells the feeling that people should have as a result of this work?

Meet the Business Owner

Alan H.

Business Owner

Alan attended high school in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He went on to study at Yale, majoring in Political Philosophy, an area he says is much more relevant to his work than initially apparent, where helping people understand other’s ways of thinking is often key, including time studying and working in Colombia, and working as Youth Director aboard a cruise ship — important experiences for a kid who never traveled anywhere until then, pretty much.

He spent a year in Israel, teaching and traveling the area, further increasing his international awareness. He then worked for several years with the antipoverty program in the Boston area, before earning a doctorate in Organization Development and International Training at UMASS in 1981.

Over this period he directed a new training program for opening the Massachusetts technical training system to various linguistic minorities, before beginning his consulting career in organization development, eventually working in over forty countries.