About Us
Harvester is a Seattle-based communications company. We help our clients build productive and powerful enterprises and work environments where people are passionate, joyful, and profoundly satisfied about serving their customers, serving each other, and continuously engaged in improving the way they work together to create value.
Our Manifesto
We human beings have forgotten that we are continuing the work of our forebears, inventing our concerns, practices, institutions, and all else in our worlds. We are responsible for making assessments about the way that we care for our worlds. We are not merely the victims of our circumstances; to care is to be committed to prepare ourselves to do what we can to take care of what our worlds bring us.
We help coaches, consultants, and leaders of enterprises develop advanced communication, diagnostic, and mobilization skills and sensibilities for successful careers.
Our Founders
Chauncey Bell
Chair & Chief of Design
For more than four decades, Chauncey Bell has worked with senior executives to reshape the skills, processes, and cultural characteristics of enterprises in North America, Latin America, and Europe. He is responsible for important innovations in several industries, and his work produces many hundreds of millions of dollars each year through growth and savings for his clients.
Chauncey has been a leader in the invention and practical application of a new theoretical framework for understanding and building effective organizations and competitive businesses. The approach that Chauncey and his colleagues constructed has proved a simple, reliable foundation for dealing with the continuous changes in offers and technology, unrelenting pressure on margins, increasingly diverse, multicultural workforces, and extensive outsourcing that characterize commercial and governmental organizations today.
Chauncey holds an AB degree in English Literature from Harvard University. He has been awarded a half-dozen software patents and has written prolifically on the subject of business design.
Saqib Rasool
CEO
Saqib brings more than 20 years’ experience in technology companies, as an engineer and manager of key initiatives, and an inventor and architect of major technological innovations and software. His career has spanned multiple industries including software, healthcare, education, investments and finance, and e-commerce. He brings all of this experience to Harvester as a technologist and a trusted advisor to a broad array of clients.
Earlier in his career, Saqib spent nearly eight years at Microsoft in key technology and management roles. He later went on to found the Metafos Inc., aimed at revolutionizing the online payment systems. He also founded Conceivian, a startup studio, widely recognized for helping develop tech startups in Seattle and Silicon Valley.
Saqib holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Minnesota State University. He is a voracious reader and an avid tinkerer and is personally and professionally committed to designing, building and helping run businesses where he sees a convergence of social and economic interests.
Our History
Chauncey began this part of his career more than 40 years ago, designing and implementing operating models and systems for better orchestration of work in enterprises. More than 30 years ago, Chauncey met Fernando Flores, whose work had been inspired by Martin Heidegger, Stafford Beer, John L. Austin, John Searle, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and others. The two became friends and began a long collaboration that has included starting and running Action Technologies, Inc., Business Design Associates, Inc., Hermenet, Inc., and LogoNet, Inc. Notable collaborators of theirs have included Terry Winograd, Juan Ludlow, Hubert Dreyfus, James Gosling, and Peter Denning. The practices and technologies invented in those companies would be used in growing clients' businesses, sometimes to multinational giants, and some of what they invented has found its way into the fundamentals of modern management sciences and practices.
Saqib began his career 20 years ago at Microsoft and later ventured into the world of startups and innovation. He had been searching for ways to conceptualize and build communication protocols and applications to improve business conditions, in the US and Asia. In 2006 Saqib met Chauncey. The Harvester Initiative began as an ongoing collaboration between Chauncey and Saqib, to inquire into the challenges businesses face in the 21st century, and explore new possibilities available for the application of Chauncey's past work, in smaller enterprises.
We formed Harvester & Co. in January 2015 to introduce to the business world new skills, sensibilities, and technologies that enable people and enterprises to create powerful new futures. In January 2019 we changed the name to Harvester Academy to reflect more closely our commitment to the education of consultants worldwide.
Our Team
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Our team and our network is the secret ingredient behind our key successes. Our globally diverse people and partners come from our lifelong networks of collaborators. We have worked together for decades on confronting crucial business challenges, designing remarkable innovations and building and launching technology products and platforms. We set a bar high, and then we meet it.