“Deborah believes her management background helps her empathize with her clients’ real-world concerns.”
Deborah Denenberg
Stanford University, BA English Literature
Harvard Business School, MBA
Deborah has been studying communications since childhood, often visiting her mother’s advertising agency after school to listen and observe the action. Deborah graduated from Stanford University in 1981 with a BA in English Literature. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Deborah began her career at the Upstairs Dinner Theater in Omaha, NE, as Producer/General Manager of this live, professional theater. She returned this failing venture to profitability, and the turnaround became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, Lyric, Inc., taught at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and other business schools nationwide.
In 1989, Deborah joined Broadway producers Dodger Productions. There she created and built Big League Theatricals, an industry leader that produces national tours of Broadway shows. Representative productions include: Guys and Dolls, The Secret Garden, Into the Woods, Driving Miss Daisy and The Who’s Tommy, the most profitable production of this multimedia Broadway musical.
During her tenure with Big League Theatricals, Deborah co-founded Blackberry Technologies Inc., an Internet software-outsourcing company. Deborah left Big League Theatricals in 1997 to focus on Blackberry. The company grew to $12 million in annual sales and was acquired by Plural in April 2000.
Deborah founded Hark! Communications after the sale of Blackberry. She believes her management background helps her empathize with her clients’ real-world concerns.
She taught for two years at Columbia Business School in the Entrepreneurship Department. For three years, she taught an intensive course in Management Communications at NYU Stern School of Business. When Stanford Graduate School of Business launched its new curriculum in 2007, Deborah became a writing coach for its Mastery in Communication Initiative. She coached MBA students in the Critical Analytical Thinking course and was the top-rated coach for five of six years.
A Deborah Anecdote
“Shona Sculpture is a metaphor for leadership communication. Chisel away the awkward, the unnecessary, the jargon, allowing the message to ring out clearly.”
Deborah’s adventurous mother combed the bush in Zimbabwe, looking for artist colonies of the Shona tribe. Shona sculpture, created from serpentine and other hard stone, tends to be clean, modern and somewhat abstract, often taking as its subjects families, mother-child, birds or animals. The Shona artists believe that the spirit of the art is already in the stone, and the job of the artist is to chisel away the unneeded stone, allowing the spirit to come out.