Boardroom and Bedroom: Consulting with Organizations and Family Systems

Neil Katz is a loyal St. Louis Cardinals fan and a career organizational consultant. Jim Hibel is a loyal Florida Marlins fan and a career family therapist. Nova Southeastern University brought their professional disciplines under the same roof at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences and the Cardinals and Marlins now share the same Spring Training Facility. Over the past several years, Neil and Jim have met regularly for Cardinal and Marlins spring training games, shared their mutual love of the game, and found ways to appreciate their different teams. In between innings, and rain delays they often talked about the passion, satisfaction, assumptions, and challenges they both experienced in their different professional practices. Through these conversations they became aware that though their disciplines have traditionally been isolated from one another, there are many interesting and potentially useful points of intersection. Thinking that these conversations might be beneficial to professional practitioners in organizational conflict, family therapy, and other related fields they decided to tape and edit some of their conversations. In the edited transcript that follows, Dr. Hibel is identified as JH and Dr Katz is identified as NK.