Denis Maessen (1961) studied political science and law and gained the postgraduate degree Master of Management Consultancy (MMC) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/ROA. He started his career at the marine’s corps, where he was long-term in command of highly specialized international intervention teams. His expertise concerned contra-terrorism.

Meanwhile, he has been active as a management consultant for 16 years now. Denis started the profession from The Hague, especially in the field of policy innovation and governmental decision support in the top of governmental bodies. The last 12 years he worked primarily as a process counselor in the field of strategy development issues within the profit sector (multinationals and small- and medium-sized enterprises) as well as acting as a sounding board for the non-executive board, executive board and management. At first as a partner at Rijnconsult/Ordina, where he was operational as a manager for the competence group ‘Leadership, in Strategic Change’ up to 1998. Later as independent consultant with more and more focus on arranging and accompanying extensive organization broad innovation and transformation issues. Identity, inspiration and innovation are key words for him in reaching a concrete result-oriented approach for organizational issues. The assessment between organization- and leadership-development (vision, leadership, power & personal mastering) gets extra attention herewith. Besides consultancy he is entrepreneurial active in e-business and biotechnology, lectures at several universities and business schools. Denis Maessen is founder and partner of SDG.