About Fierce Leaders

We work with owners and CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses every day as owners of Renaissance Executive Forums of Minneapolis, and every day we’re impressed with the wisdom, insight, and courage of the leaders we meet.  Because our process involves creating high-performing peer groups, we know that when leaders share their experience they can make better decisions, improve accountability throughout their organizations, and grow their top and bottom lines. Many businesses and their leaders have been transformed by the process of sharing experience. We want everyone to be able to know what that can be like. We created Fierce Leaders to provide an opportunity for leaders to learn from the experiences of others, and to help others to succeed by sharing their own successes and failures.

About Jim Skyrms

Jim Skyrms has been helping organizations grow and prosper for over 40 years. He has excelled at bringing people together from different sectors, industries, cultures and backgrounds to find creative solutions to problems, discover new paths forward, and achieve business goals and personal satisfaction.

Jim started his first business at age fourteen. He has held leadership roles in both non-profit and for-profit organizations and has worked in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, retail, foods, recreation, construction, software development, consulting and higher education.

Jim was named Rector of Teikyo University Holland in 1992. The private, for-profit university had been founded six months earlier, but attracted few students and accumulated significant debt. Jim built innovative partnerships with colleges and universities from 16 countries in Europe, Asia, Mexico and the United States to create a new model for international education. By 1999, Jim made the university profitable by filling the campus classrooms and dormitories while significantly increasing the quality of education and reducing the cost to students.

As a consultant, Jim helped a leading Dutch business school adapt to the digital economy. He wrote software and content that enabled one of the world’s largest consulting firms to move its new employee training program from face-to-face classes to on-demand web-based instruction, resulting in improved trainee satisfaction and better job performance while reducing costs by more than 50%.

In 1999, just a few weeks after the bombs stopped falling, Jim began work to develop new businesses and economic institutions in Kosovo. He has been a principal consultant to Riinvest Institute for Development Research in Prishtina for the past eight years, helping the organization become the most influential local source of development expertise. He has led workshops for entrepreneurs, and helped the Women’s Business Association of Kosovo support and develop more than 150 woman-owned businesses throughout Kosovo. In recognition of his contributions to the economic development of Kosovo, Jim was recently named Distinguished Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Riinvest University.

Jim plays the bass guitar in a blues band every week, and is an avid reader. He wrote his first novel in November of 2006.

About Leslie Skyrms

Leslie Skyrms has served as an executive consultant for nearly 15 years. She has counseled CEOs, business owners and leadership teams about communications planning, media relations, change management and brand and marketing campaign development. She has special expertise in helping companies develop better customer understanding and focus.

She has produced communications materials for use on five continents, writing speeches for executives in the Philippines, Middle East, South America, Europe, the US and Cuba, water development reports for the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan, and marketing materials for use around the world. This work has allowed her to develop a keen eye and discerning ear for working across cultures.

Leslie was brought in as a consultant to spearhead the communications effort for a division of Honeywell International’s multimillion dollar conversion to SAP. She also worked closely with Honeywell Defense and Space management teams at nine sites to improve employee trust and satisfaction.

She has produced multimillion dollar corporate shows in Paris, Munich, Barcelona and the Netherlands for Océ Technologies, a multinational copying and printing company specializing in high-speed, high-volume hardware and sophisticated document management software.

She has also managed brand overhauls for Compaq Computers, DAF Trucks and Royal Philips Electronics. Other clients include Akzo Nobel, United Properties, Mercedes Benz, Canon, DSM, and more than 100 other organizations large and small.

Leslie grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, lived and worked in Valkenburg, the Netherlands for 10 years and currently lives in Hopkins, Minnesota with her husband Jim, and Emma and Grace, the Wonder Dogs.

Leslie is a committed triathlete and spends as much time as Minnesota’s weather allows outside in the lakes and on the bike and running paths. She is a volunteer Guardian ad Litem for Hennepin County and regularly serves meals with Loaves and Fishes. She loves reading, writing, traveling, and performing and watching improvisational theatre.