Several years ago, Sarah Sandberg watched a television program about one-hundred-year-old people. “I got two things out of it—take good care of your teeth, and take the risks,” she said. “I didn’t want to turn one hundred and wish I had taken more risks.”
That’s why Sandberg quit a “perfectly good job” as partner at a consulting firm, Novations, Inc., to form a consulting partnership. She partnered with Harvard professor Keith Allred and is now CEO of the online survey company, Dynamic Feedback.
Much of Sandberg and Allred’s initial consulting work was in the area of negotiation skills and conflict management. To help clients assess their skills in these areas, Sandberg and Allred developed the Personal Conflict Profile (PCP), a 360-degree feedback survey instrument. In taking the PCP, a client answers a battery of questions regarding his or her own negotiation and conflict management skills.
Additionally, the client’s peers, subordinates, and superiors answer the same battery of questions about that person. The resulting feedback is a portrayal of the client’s skills, both from their own perspective, and from the perspective of those around them.
To test the PCP, Sandberg and Allred administered it to Allred’s negotiation classes at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where it was an instant hit among students and faculty alike. However, the first PCP was a paper and pencil survey, and the required mailing, faxing, and sorting was cumbersome, Sandberg said.
Being the late 1990s and well into the information age, the next step seemed obvious: put the survey online. Once online, the ease of administration and data collection greatly increased, and demand for the PCP grew. “We knew then that we might have something,” Sandberg said. She and Allred changed the focus of their business from negotiation consulting to online surveys and data gathering—and the name of their business from Pioneer Negotiations to Dynamic Feedback.
Having survived the dot com implosion, Dynamic Feedback has expanded its academic market to include universities such as Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Northwestern. It also serves consultants and industry customers such as Deutsche Bank, U.S. Postal Service, Pfizer, and Chevron. Dynamic Feedback now provides a wide range of off-the-shelf and custom survey products. The company maintains permanent technical and customer support teams in Salt Lake City.
As CEO, Sandberg enjoys the challenge of building a company. She earned her BA in American civilization from Brown University in 1983 and her MOB from the Marriott School in 1988. Her husband, Jonathan Hale, works as a physician and screenwriter. They reside in Salt Lake City with their three children.
