An Exceptional Pair
Nancy Egan • New Voodou
Nancy Egan believes that “The world is made of magic, and we are all to some degree magicians.”
She is a magician who helps people identify and articulate their values and aspirations, to embrace and strengthen their cultures, to name and own their territory.
She always talks about calling things we want to ourselves, and she tells the story about telling a client that it was amateur voodoo. The client said, “Nancy, you’re no amateur….”
It’s not surprising that when Nancy selected a name for her own firm, she chose New Voodou.
Three Questions
What do you know about you?
What do you know about them?
What do they know about you?
These are the three questions that Nancy Egan has been asking clients for more than 30 years.
Nancy focuses on meaning — not just semantics, but the power of what we say and how we say it. She is one of the most fluent communicators I have ever encountered. Although she makes it look effortless, it’s because she not only has the skill and intellect, but because she has done the work. She literally practices what she preaches.
On the other hand, I seek patterns — syntactic structures — of organizations and behavior, actions and reactions, possibility and strategy. I was trained to teach, and like many Boomers, I’m an explainer — often in great detail. Thankfully, Nancy is a ruthless editor, too.
Together we have helped people create frameworks for sustainable and successful evolution and growth.
Connecting the Dots
But how did we come together, and how did our partnership evolve over the 30+ years that we have been working together?
As with so many relationships, we were introduced. 50 years ago, Weld Coxe literally wrote the book on marketing for A/E firms. He also mentored an amazing number of bright, young people who were learning how to market, and he loved connecting them.
Weld told me that I should meet Nancy Egan, the Director of Marketing with Interspace — a company that was developing business in the corporate workplace market. Needless to say, I called Nancy, and we had lunch together in Philadelphia. She was one of the pioneers in marketing professional design services, — incredibly smart with a great sense of humor plus curiosity and pure joy. Nancy and I stayed in touch, catching up with each other occasionally. During this period, I shifted from consulting to recruiting, building my own business and winning work.
Weld always said, if you can bring in work, you don’t need to work for anyone else. In 1987, I left The Coxe Group with Weld’s blessing and two of my clients that were beginning their own new trajectories. Luckily, I had a direct connection to Nancy, too. She was an active member of SMPS, and in a phone conversation one day, she told me that she had organized a panel discussion with Paul Nakazawa as a speaker. They had worked together at Clark Tribble Harris Li (now LS3P) in NYC. I had recruited Paul to be Managing Principal of Moshe Safdie’s firm, and he had become my client. We talked about the possibility of the three of us doing something together, someday.
Despite the 1992 recession, 1993 turned out to be a very propitious year. I had been working with a large A/E firm based in Miami, and one day, the partners called and asked me to help them with strategic planning. I said that I’d love to do it, but I needed some help. I called Nancy and Paul, and they both said yes. A couple of weeks later, we flew to Miami for a 2-day strategic retreat that went quite well. At the end, the CFO asked us how long we had been working together. I looked at my watch and said, “48 hours.”
It was an inflection point. Nancy and Paul were both making significant changes in their careers, leaving their current employers to hang out their own shingles. Although each of us had a separate practice, we agreed to look for opportunities to continue working together. And we did.
Write Teach + Testify
Nancy has always emphasized the importance of storytelling, and of finding the best venues to do it. She had been writing and speaking for years, and I had been speaking and teaching. Paul had accepted a teaching position with the Harvard GSD, and in 1995, we began teaching together In the ExecEd program — The Talent-Driven Firm: Building a Competitive Advantage. Over the next 15 years, we continued to teach, and Nancy created opportunities for us to write, beginning with a series of articles in Contract magazine and extending beyond.
Even though we lived in three different cities, we were able to get together regularly, and as we worked together, we discovered new things about ourselves, sharing our own values and aspirations, and learning to be partners, as well as friends.
By 2004, Paul was engaged in independent advisory work, which gave Nancy and me an opportunity to create a new consulting framework. We continued to work with our own clients, but there were often opportunities to work together, and to write as well.
With the advent of social media, we jumped on the bandwagon. I took to Twitter like a duck to water, and as a result, SMPS asked me to develop their first program on social media strategy (with Nancy’s collaboration, of course). The following year, Nancy and I developed a 2-day program on social media strategy for Harvard GSD ExecEd. By 2011, I had joined Nancy as a Contributing Editor for Marketer, the Journal of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS), and we began to write a series of articles focused on strategy for that growing audience. In addition, we were both asked to present at KA Connect, the annual event produced by Christopher Parsons, the brilliant founder of Knowledge Architecture.
Nancy Egan - Cultural DNA: The Key to Competitive Advantage
Marjanne Pearson - Organizing Around Intellect
Journey to Tomorrow
We’ll leave the next ten years for another story. Our lives changed. Nancy remarried, moving from NYC to Los Angeles and then Santa Fe NM. I moved from San Francisco to Oakland and then Sonoma CA. Through everything, we have continued to be friends and partners, sharing tears of sorrow and joy, and cherishing the gift of friendship and partnership that we have created with each other. We have continued to write and teach, and we have taken testimony to a new level.
Tip + Tux • An Exceptional Pair by Nancy Egan
The Story of Tip + Tux
And now, the lagniappe – the unexpected gift — the story behind Nancy’s charming photograph. For years, she has been collecting delightful Mexican carved creatures, and she has been creating tableaux in which they can find their own voices. Since retiring at the end of 2023, she has taken up photography and has been honing her creative skills.
Here’s the story, from this exceptional pair.
Tip:
“It was sooo boring just sitting on the bookshelf, that late one afternoon, I spotted the checker board and invited Tux to play. I know he’s a cat, but he’s pretty smart. He’s even beaten me in a few games.”
Tux:
“Tip is right about the boredom, not that I mind just being admired for my looks. And he’s not bad for a dog. I even let him win a few games, so he doesn’t get discouraged and quit playing.”
Credits
If you enjoyed Tip + Tux’s story, you’ll love Nancy’s books, published in hardcover and softcover at blurb.com.
Folk Art Misbehaving
Postcards From My Feet
If These Clothes Could Talk (coming soon)
© 2025 – Nancy Egan | NewVoodou | @newvoodoudeux
Chiquito enjoying life • Nancy Egan
NOTES
We learned about lagniappes from Allen Eskew, the founder of Eskew Dumez Ripple. He was one of our favorite clients, and we miss him.
A few of our published articles and videos are available for download in the Insights + Ideas section of this new website. We’re adding the others as fast as we can, so stay tuned.
Thank you so much for visiting! We look forward to your stories, too.
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