Gary Cohen Biography
Gary Cohen is Managing Partner and Co-founder of CO2 Coaching (2004), an Executive Coaching and Leadership Development Firm based in Minneapolis. Under his leadership, CO2 Coaching built its practice around a single conviction: the questions a leader asks matter more than the answers a leader gives. That conviction became Just Ask Leadership, and it now shapes how every CO2 coach works with clients, offering not just insights but alternative courses of action drawn from unexpected questions rather than ready answers.
Background: Before founding CO2 Coaching, Gary Cohen founded ACI in 1989 with $4,000 and two employees, then grew it 48 percent compounded annually for 12 years to over 2,200 employees and took it public on the NASDAQ. ACI was named to Venture Magazine’s Top 10 Best Performing Businesses and Business Journal’s 25 Fastest Growing Small Public Companies, and Gary was an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist. That experience, operating at scale and living with the consequences of his own decisions, informs how CO2 Coaching’s Managing Partner approaches every engagement today.
Proprietary models and tools: As Managing Partner, Gary has directed the development of the frameworks that now define CO2 Coaching’s methodology, built to help leaders diagnose problems at the right altitude before trying to solve them. The Triad Operating Architecture separates every leadership challenge into three systems: the Business Operating System, which governs strategy, structure, and execution; the Collective Operating System, which governs trust, commitment, and accountability between people; and the Human Operating System, which governs a leader’s own judgment, regulation, and capacity under pressure. No one amidst a forest can see all of it, which is why CO2 Coaching trains its coaches to locate a problem in its proper system rather than treat every issue as a personal one.
Alongside the Triad, the firm’s ASCENT model pinpoints the specific leadership elements, such as delegation, decision rights, and self-management, that matter most in a given situation, and its PEAK questioning framework structures inquiry across four modes: Professor, Innovator, Judge, and Director. Together, these tools give CO2 Coaching’s clients a shared language for naming what is actually in the way, and a disciplined way of asking the questions that move it.
Board memberships: All Kinds of Minds, Harvard Alumni Club of Minnesota, IC Systems, Inc., Richfield Bank, ACI, Telecentrics, Outward Bound National Advisory, HBS Alumni Club of Minnesota (Past President), Minnesota Zoo Foundation, among others.
Author: Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions (McGraw Hill 2009); articles for Business Week, Leader to Leader, and Forbes.
Clients: Unilever, Intel, Genentech, MetLife, Thermo-Fisher, and 100-plus entrepreneur-led businesses.
Education: University of Minnesota (B.A.); Harvard Business School; Covey Leadership Center; Disney Leadership Institute; and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow.
Want to know more about Gary Cohen’s approach to leadership and life? Read his blog, Elements of Leadership.
