TEACHER
Gabriel Sakakeeny
There is something eternal in you. It is there already and out of view. Bring it to light and you have it for the rest of your life, at work, at home, and under pressure. That is the work Gabriel does. He founded the Subtle Power Way and teaches it, and since 1990 he has taught more than 30,000 leaders. His purpose is to evoke, communicate, and create Transcendence with people who are ready, willing, and able to do the work.
For fifty years, in rooms as different as a factory floor in Santa Rosa and a concert hall in Shandong province, Gabriel Sakakeeny has led groups of people to produce results they did not believe were available to them.
The settings look unrelated until you watch him work. An orchestra of volunteers played Mahler at a professional standard, a microwave assembly line cut its build time by 80%, and a middle-market company more than doubled its revenue in eighteen months. What changed in each case was the same thing. People stopped operating out of victimhood and distraction, and took on a shared purpose and goals beyond anything they had set before. That shift in aligned purpose and clear intention is what produced the results.
The Subtle Power Way is the method made teachable.
Thirty years in corporate work
Gabriel joined Agilent Technologies in 1999, shortly after it separated from Hewlett-Packard. In 2001 the telecom market collapsed and the company ran layoffs, which the people there had never considered possible. He built and led the Communication, Commitment, and Results initiative through the five years that followed, taking a management culture that was political and unaccountable and making it entrepreneurial and answerable for results. It began without official sanction and spent two years being resisted by the people that owned training. After it reached the top fifty managers, the chief executive declared it the way the company would be managed and funded its expansion with two million dollars. Gabriel trained more than 3,300 managers worldwide and ran a team of fifteen facilitators and project managers to do it.
What the curriculum did on the ground was visible in the Microwave Test Division, where assembly time went from 2.6 days to half a day inside six months and the division's annual costs came down by roughly ten million dollars over the same period. Neither number is attributable to the training alone. A shift in how people think and work together shows up everywhere in a business at once, which is exactly the point.
Before Agilent he was faculty at JMW Consultants, delivering executive development for British Petroleum, AT&T, Motorola, and Abu Dhabi Mining. Since 2005 he has run his own consultancy, designing leadership curricula for Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Spectra Logic, Verigy, and others. At Spectra Logic he ran the Leadership, Creativity, and Power curriculum for the senior managers over eighteen months, during which revenue grew from sixty million to one hundred and thirty million dollars.
He has also held executive roles rather than advising them. He was Chief HR Officer at Medley Capital during a period when assets under management went from 1.6 to 2.7 billion dollars, and he co-founded Jupiter Systems, the software company that shipped the first audio processing plug-ins for Avid's ProTools and was acquired by Antares Technologies.
Fifty years leading musical ensembles
He wrote and conducted his first ballet score in 1970, entered the conducting major and mounted his first public concerts in 1972, and holds a Master of Music in orchestral conducting from the Shepherd School at Rice University and a Bachelor of Music from the San Francisco Conservatory. In 1998 the Cotati City Council asked him to start an orchestra. He built it into American Philharmonic, an all-volunteer ensemble of seventy-five players giving eighteen free concerts a year to audiences of around eight hundred, funded by asking people to donate what they could at the end of the evening.
In 2010 the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China invited American Philharmonic to tour seven cities. He led the negotiation, the programming, the performances, and the logistics of moving sixty musicians and their partners across the world for two weeks. In 2011 the United States Congress gave him Special Congressional Recognition for the work.
He is also a composer, and the inventor of OSIRES™, an instrument reinforcement system that makes an orchestra's string section sound four times larger with no audible artifacts.
Standing in front of seventy-five volunteers who owe you nothing, and getting a performance out of them that none of them could have produced alone, is the same discipline the Institute teaches.
A lifetime of practice
The inner work came first and has never stopped. As a child, Gabriel had ecstatic out-of-body experiences inside the Catholic tradition he was raised in, which could not explain them. At twelve he was given a mentor who introduced him to Indian philosophy and the Vedantic texts. In 1968 he became one of the first American disciples of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and shortly after took up Sant Mat, meditating two and a half hours a day and living a monastic discipline until 1983.
In 1988 he entered the tradition of large-group transformational education, and went on to become a senior seminar leader and advanced course co-leader for Landmark Education, which is where the transmission of this kind of work in a live training room became his craft rather than his subject. In 2003 he entered the Spiritual Unfoldment Network, and after two years of coursework and a final year of training with its founder, Irving Fuerst, was initiated as a certified teacher.
The Subtle Power Way came out of those fifty years of inner and outer work. It has been proven for thirty years with the hardest audience there is: a room of skeptical executives who have somewhere else to be.
The Book
Subtle POWER: A Guide to the Human Operating System for Intentional Leaders, published 2014, is the written foundation of the Institute's curriculum.
"Gabriel Sakakeeny is a natural leader who inspires people to produce results far beyond what they believe possible. His ability to communicate clearly is remarkable; that he does so without pressure or intimidation is perhaps why people respond so positively."
CARL VAST · VICE-PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS
"Insights from one three-day weekend were like eight years of weekly therapy, and business coaching on root-cause issues, to boot."
MINDA AGUHOB · RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGIST AND MEDITATION TEACHER
Gabriel teaches the Foundation programs and the Leadership Curriculum himself, in groups small enough that he works with each person directly.