Dennis M. Powell

Dennis M. Powell is a speaker, trainer and advisor on strategic leadership focused on helping organizations create and implement successful strategies to move from NOW to NEXT. 

Powell works with leadership teams to eliminate confusion between:

• vision and execution
• alignment and accountability
• planning and decision ownership

He brings decades of experience guiding diverse organizations through strategic challenges and common execution failures. He has worked with associations, nonprofit boards, executive teams, and senior leaders to simplify complexity and drive results.

In his book, "Leading from the Top: Presidential Lessons in Issues Management," Powell unpacks real leadership lessons from more than 90 years of presidential strategy execution dealing with the most complex issues, on the biggest stage, under the most intense scrutiny to glean lessons and translate them into practical tools for today’s leaders.

His latest book, “Now to NEXT: The Art and Science of Strategic Leadership” (Spring 2026) presents 40 strategic approaches to issues management that bridge the gap between vision and execution with strategies that can be applied by leaders to the challenges they face today.  

Powell has worked on multi-billion issues helping align resources, establish achievable goals, control the issue narrative, build broad-based coalitions, facilitate strategic planning, and create, execute and monitor strategy. He has also presented on strategic leadership to international, national and statewide organizations.

The “pain points” his programs and processes address:

1. Strategic drift and fragmentation that result in lost momentum
2. Leadership misalignment and decision paralysis that stall strategy
3. Weak or ineffective messaging that undermines trust
4. Governance and structural barriers that slow execution
5. Change fatigue and member/stakeholder disengagement