About Us

cs-logo-olive.jpg At Creative Sage™, we help organizations, project teams and individuals innovate to create outstanding management and marketing strategies, communications, solutions, services and products.

We design custom-tailored, modular creativity and innovation programs, and we consult with, train, mentor and coach people in every level of the workplace who are currently employed in corporations, on project teams, in their own businesses, nonprofit organizations, or in the arts. We also partner businesses and nonprofit organizations for projects that make the world a better place.

Additionally, we coach and mentor people who want to revolutionize “retirement” or who are already “retired” and want to create more meaningful lives. We design modular programs for executives, entrepreneurs and accomplished professionals who are approaching retirement and want to re-engineer their lives for greatness after they leave their current workplace.

We bring your inner innovator out of hiding. We help you innovate to be great!

Creative Sage™ grew as a company branch from our previously established company, Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates, where we help our clients get the word out and attract new clients through our marketing communications, public relations, business development, strategy mentoring and consulting programs. By popular demand, our clients asked founder and Chief Imagination Officer Cathryn Hrudicka to teach them some of her own techniques to sustain creativity and optimize innovation as a result of her ongoing success in coming up with remarkable solutions to their problems.

In addition to our programs in creativity and innovation, our team of talented associates implements marketing, public relations, print and online publishing campaigns. Our capabilities include designing print, online and multimedia collateral. We write first-rate copy, manage projects and edit publications. We do online marketing campaigns, and create content for e-letters, blogs, podcasts and AV/multimedia productions.

We also offer nonprofit organizations consulting, coaching and mentoring in the areas of marketing, communications, public relations, fundraising and strategic planning, and event production. We have co-produced many benefit events, concerts, exhibits and other innovative programs. Please see our sister blog, PR, Social Media, and Marketing Mentor™.

We bring your message to the world, and the world to you.
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Photo of Cathryn Hrudicka, ©2010 Margaretta Mitchell

Cathryn Hrudicka, innovation consultant and program designer, executive coach, multidisciplinary artist, and Chief Imagination Officer of her company, Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates/Creative Sage™, lives a passionate personal mission to cause the spontaneous combustion of creativity, innovation, and compassionate intelligence everywhere in the world! Her vision is to dig deep and bring together the very best thinking, business practices, artistic imagination, scientific research and technical prowess to ignite a new era of interdisciplinary innovation and collaboration.

Recognizing that most organizations, institutions and governments need new ideas, services and products to succeed effectively in the global marketplace, Cathryn has developed exciting, on-the-edge, breakthrough methods and processes to help organizations move forward and generate truly breakthrough ideas. She has also designed new, comprehensive, proven, best practice approaches for generating and implementing great ideas—at an accelerated pace, in a fun, energizing way!

Cathryn Hrudicka is recognized by colleagues and clients as a management mentor and strategy consultant. She is also a public relations, marketing and Internet marketing expert, writer, editor, executive coach, and an expert in creativity and innovation. At the request of her clients, she has developed this exciting branch of her company, Creative Sage™, where she serves as a management consultant, trainer, facilitator and executive coach, helping organizations, project teams and individuals to enhance their creative and innovative abilities to develop effective and outstanding marketing strategies, communications, services and products. Cathryn designs programs for businesses and nonprofits, and she coaches people who seek to revolutionize the idea of “retirement” by creating extraordinary lives for themselves. Cathryn loves to help others learn how to innovate to be great!

Our original organization, Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates, is an expert media relations, marketing and publications consulting company with a proven track record of obtaining extensive regional, national and international media coverage for clients in the entertainment industry, business and technology, and for notable leaders in the nonprofit world, for over twenty years.

Known for her highly innovative approaches to developing story angles and targeting media, including print, broadcast and on the Internet, her impressive results have made Cathryn Hrudicka a preferred consultant for challenging public relations and media marketing projects.

Cathryn launched her career in the entertainment industry and the arts, handling publicity, radio promotion and marketing for rock, jazz, blues and new music artists, and she later expanded to theatre, dance, fine arts, film and video, and multimedia clients. She promoted concerts, tours and recordings for artists such as Elvin Bishop, Kid Courage, The Jefferson Starship, The Grateful Dead, Hiroshima, Tom Coster of Santana, and she co-produced the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco classical, jazz and blues concert series, among many others.

In broadcast promotion, she partnered with Augie Blume & Associates, a radio promotion firm that was voted “Billboard Magazine Best Independent Promoter of the Year” for several years. Cathryn was part of several collaborative teams producing high-end audio/visual marketing, sales and training presentations for leading high tech companies, colleges and universities, museums and other clients. In that capacity, she worked with the Kenwood Group—later, One Pass Video—and Lumier, on projects for such companies as Applied Technology, Hewlett-Packard, American Express, Transamerica Corporation, Landor Associates, the University of California, the University of Chicago, among a long list of leading companies and institutions.

In her parallel artistic career, Cathryn is also the author of six novels, a forthcoming nonfiction book series on creativity and innovation, and she has written many articles and columns that have been published in business periodicals, arts and entertainment industry publications, and online. (A list is available upon request.)

Additionally, she has many professional credits as a vocalist and musician, composer, songwriter, poet and sound designer, as well as having worked on projects as an independent film and video producer. As a sound designer, she apprenticed with multiple Academy Award-Winner Randy Thom, Director of the Sound Department at Skywalker Sound, and at the Music Annex (now Annex Digital), where she worked on productions for film and television, interactive games, internet and radio projects, and toy sound effects for Sesame Street, Mattel and Leapfrog products, among others. She has served an associate recording engineer on live, location projects for Links Sound, including recording members of the San Francisco Symphony, the Music at Kohl Mansion Concert Series in Burlingame, and a list of world-renowned performers.

Cathryn has been nominated for positions on the NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) Board of Governors, along with serving on other notable nonprofit Boards, and she was invited to be included in The National Association for Female Executives (as a special member), and The Sterling Who’s Who Executive Edition, and the Directory of 2,000 Notable American Women. She is currently founding a West Coast Chapter of the American Creativity Association, working on an international Social Entrepreneur project in Bali with GIVE and the Golden Gate Chapter of the Rotary Club, and she is on the planning committee for the Women in Consulting San Francisco Satellite. She has held an office or has served as an active member of professional organizations that include the Audio Engineering Society, Bay Area Women in Music, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and many other internet, business and technology trade associations. She has spoken on industry trade panels, on topics ranging from the promotion and distribution of independent recordings to the development of innovative multimedia and Internet audio and video technologies.

Cathryn Hrudicka feels her multi-faceted background in business, nonprofit management, strategy and innovation training, executive coaching, the arts, media and digital technology, offers a unique window on the business world that most creativity and innovation consultants and coaches would not have. She feels she had led a truly whole-brain life, and she has studied creativity and innovation in detail, applying her knowledge and practical experience as a working artist, entrepreneur and manager, in a remarkable synthesis. She is able to offer her clients a series of techniques, approaches and processes for accessing creativity and managing innovation that she has tested first-hand in every aspect of her life and work. She strongly feels her business, social service and artistic backgrounds all complement each other and produce extraordinary results that are stronger because of this diversity in her experience.

Cathryn is truly a modern Renaissance leader. She has done extensive research in different countries of the world in many of the key creativity and innovation processes of recent decades, and she is able to source other experts in specialized techniques to work as part of the Creative Sage™ team on specific client projects.

We are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Mendocino, California, but we work with clients across the U.S.A. and around the world.

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