Roland Dietz

Roland Dietz heads Focused Growth Partners, Inc. with 25+ years of experience architecting, building and operating high growth businesses in industries leveraging knowledge and technology. Some examples:

• Science Publishing and R+D tools: Medical, Pharmaceutical, Engineering, Government applications
• SaaS Business to Business solutions for legal, GRC, and SEARCH applications
• Semiconductor, Consumer Electronics and Computer Hardware and software
• IT service solutions, and Data Driven solutions for Agriculture.

A central theme in Roland’s approach to leadership in knowledge enabled businesses is to find unique ways to integrate People and Technology deployment strategies, as the major driver of value creation and differentiation. Leadership in a high speed, interconnected operating environment, requires an ability to bring together excellent contributors and enable them to excel as individuals and as a winning team.

Roland has been named “the stakeholders’ stakeholder”, for his ability to create a vison and deliver execution that aligns diverse company stakeholders to support the effort.

Focused Growth Partners, Inc. was founded to support great CEO’s and their teams in their efforts to develop and execute Transformational Strategies and take advantage of the big opportunities available to knowledge enabled companies leveraging Data/Information, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and top talent (most companies struggle with this). All our partners have operating and governance experience in these fields.

Roland has held CEO and C-level positions in companies like Elsevier Science, a division of Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RELX), Endeavor, LawLogix group, Tulip Computers and Philips Electronic Industries (NYSE: PHG). He has served on several boards as director, audit committee and chair remuneration committee, and Chairman (CABI, Scienceserver, Adonis, Ticer).

As an experienced high stakes negotiator, he has personally secured groundbreaking arrangements with the governments of Japan, China, Brazil, Mexico, India, UK and New Zealand for critical infrastructure supporting e-learning and e-research activities. His teams have literally built the first infrastructure for delivery of digital information at premier research and education institutes and corporate centers around the world.

As a sought-after speaker, Roland has addressed the UNESCO conference in Tokyo, the serials ecosystem conference in Canada and many others in the USA and abroad. He has conducted workshops on how to do business in international markets for trade associations (SAMA), universities and large corporations (Walgreens, Schneider Electric)

Mr. Dietz is a graduate from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands with a Masters’ Degree in Artificial intelligence and completed several stints of executive educations supported by Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Universities. He currently provides guest lectures on Ai and business of IT services at ASU and supports innovations as mentor at the Arizona Commerce Authority – Venture Ready program. He mentors and coaches many students at the WP Carey school of business and the Fulton school of Engineering at ASU.

Roland is a certified and license trainer coach in several physical fitness modalities, working on athletic readiness and quality of movement/ strength and conditioning. He is a dual citizen of the USA and Netherlands, is married with two daughters and two granddaughters.