Chris Cavanaugh-Simmons is a management consultant and executive coach based in Northern California. She is one of Silicon Valley's go-to people for leadership development. Among her clients over the years: Oracle, Haas School of Business (UC-Berkeley), Salesforce, Sandia National Laboratories, and Brown-Forman.

Born and raised in Oakland, California, Chris was educated in counseling at San Francisco State University and has wide experience in business. She has sought in her career to combine two great rivers—her love of business and entrepreneurship, and her passion to make the world better, gentler, more receptive to diversity.

In the 1990's she began studying a powerful new field, narrative therapy, and realized she could translate its concepts into coaching guidance for immediate use by busy executives. She became a bridge between academe and the boardroom. Today she's one of the few corporate coaches in the world who pursues diversity work through the techniques of narrative coaching, connecting on a daily basis to the challenges faced in the workplace by women, African-Americans, Latinos, and the LGBT community.

Her 2013 book is widely used internationally in leadership development programs: “Three Stories Leaders Tell: The What and Way of Using Stories to Lead.”