Who is Larry Cooper, Really?

Larry Cooper has spent more than 40 years working at the point where strategy, money, technology, operations and people meet.

He has advised senior executives, led major transformation initiatives, redesigned business processes, developed professional education, mentored teams and helped organizations make better decisions in difficult and changing environments. His work has taken him across Canada and the United States and into federal government departments, telecommunications companies, technology organizations, professional associations and international working groups.

But titles and project lists do not fully explain who Larry is—or why he created Built to Thrive.

Making Complicated Things Understandable

A consistent theme runs through Larry’s career: organizations struggle when important information is fragmented, responsibilities are unclear and decisions are disconnected from the facts.

Larry learned early that solving those problems requires more than introducing another process or piece of technology. You need to understand how the business actually works:

what it is trying to accomplish;
how money, information and work move through it;
where decisions are being delayed or made without sufficient context;
which risks and obligations are not visible;
and whether its systems help people exercise judgment or merely create more administration.

That perspective allowed him to work across disciplines that are often treated separately. His experience includes strategy, business transformation, project and portfolio leadership, service management, financial and operational systems, process redesign, organizational adaptability, learning and professional development.

Built to Thrive applies that same connected thinking to the realities of running a small business.

Experience That Produced Measurable Results

Larry’s work has not been limited to developing theories or advising from the sidelines. He has been responsible for turning difficult business problems into practical action. Among his career experiences, Larry:

led a major business-process redesign for a telecommunications company that produced a reported US$100 million in annual savings;
led a customer-training system implementation that recovered 18% of previously lost annual revenue and achieved ISO certification on its first attempt;
developed the business-capability release strategy for e2Open, described at the time as the world’s largest web-enabled supply chain;
designed an early software-services model at Environment Canada using an adaptive development approach years before the Agile Manifesto was published;
served as Chief of Capacity and Configuration Management for federal government Windows and telecommunications data centres;
provided project executive, strategic advisory and business-transformation architecture services to Employment and Social Development Canada over five years;
advised public- and private-sector executives, including assistant deputy minister-level leaders at Statistics Canada; and
led an adaptive procurement initiative for Export Development Canada that delivered the required learning-management platform using a small portion of the original budget while supporting a broader transformation of its Learning and Development group.

These assignments required more than technical expertise. They required Larry to understand costs, constraints, risks, business processes, competing priorities and the consequences of decisions across an entire organization.

An Author, Educator and Contributor

Larry has also spent a substantial part of his career helping other people understand and apply complex ideas.

He authored and taught professional courses in Agile practices, project management, business value management and IT service management. This included developing the complete ITIL V3 courseware line for Global Knowledge and contributing to professional learning roadmaps for leadership, project management and business value management for ICAgile in it’s early days.

Larry’s writing for Auerbach Publishers in their 1997 book Handbook of Local Area Networks, 3rd Edition, on distributed systems, middleware, interface-based integration and reusable application capabilities anticipated many of the architectural principles that would later be formalized through service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is what made the distributed services that enable the Internet possible.

His wider contributions have included:

serving as Author Mentor for PRINCE2 Agile by AXELOS, 2015;
contributing to publications and practitioner guidance from AXELOS, PMI and InfoQ, 2015-2018;
helping establish the Business Agility Institute’s Body of Knowledge and co-stewarding its Strategic Agility and Business Value Management areas was the Chair of its inaugural Editorial Board late 2010’s and early 2020’s;
writing the two contributions made by Canada to the OECD ICT Procurement Playbook that were included as-written, 2017;
contributing to AgileSHIFT and #NoProjects: A Culture of Continuous Value 2017-2018;
delivering the first Business Value Management course at BA World in 2010;
teaching Lean-Agile Strategy to international cohorts late 2010’s and early 2020’s; and
being invited twice to PMI’s Global Congress as an agility expert, mid 2010’s.

Larry’s 2015 book, Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers, examined how organizations can connect the delivery of work with the operation and measurement of value. That concern—connecting effort, evidence, decisions and results—continues throughout Built to Thrive.

See the Whole Business. Fix the Friction.

Larry’s background is unusually broad because much of his work took place where business functions and organizations meet—the places where friction often develops.

Problems rarely fit neatly within a single business area. A financial problem may begin with an unclear process. A technology problem may really be a decision or accountability problem. A growth problem may expose weak operating systems. A transition problem may reveal that too much essential knowledge exists only in the owner’s head.

Looking at each problem separately can address the immediate symptom without resolving its underlying cause. Larry’s approach is to step back, understand how the pieces affect one another and trace the friction to its source.

That connected perspective shapes Built to Thrive and its four areas:

Formation and Structure;
Tax and Financial Discipline;
Operations and Systems; and
Strategy and Transition.

These are not four unrelated collections of information. Decisions made in one area often create consequences in another. Together, the four areas provide a way to see the business more clearly, find what is creating friction and build the practical structure needed to move forward.

From Large Organizations to Small-Business Reality

Larry has worked on initiatives involving large budgets, complex technology and senior decision-makers. But the underlying problems are also familiar to small-business owners.

Information is scattered.
Important work depends on memory.
Financial records do not tell the complete story.
Obligations become visible too late.
The owner is pulled between today’s demands and the work needed to build a stronger business.

A small business does not need the bureaucracy of a large organization. It does, however, benefit from the same underlying disciplines:

clear responsibilities,
dependable records,
understandable money paths,
repeatable routines where they make sense and,
decisions supported by evidence.

Larry created Built to Thrive to translate those disciplines into practical guidance suitable for small Canadian businesses. The goal is not to make a small business operate like a government department or muiti-national corporation. It is to extract what is useful, remove what is unnecessary, and give owners a clearer way to think about their businesses.

The Perspective Behind Built to Thrive

Larry holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Memorial University and a Master of Arts in Public Administration from Carleton University. His professional education has covered project management, Agile practices, IT service management, organizational change and service-quality management (threough more than 20 professional certifications).

His qualifications matter, but they are not the whole story.

Built to Thrive draws on decades spent observing what happens when organizations grow without sufficient structure, when systems become disconnected from their purpose and when people are expected to make important decisions without a clear view of the facts.

It also reflects Larry’s experience as an author, educator, mentor and business owner:

explaining difficult subjects plainly,
asking the questions that expose hidden problems and,
helping people create practices they can actually sustain.

Larry is not trying to turn every small-business owner into an accountant, strategist, process specialist or technology expert. He is helping owners understand enough to remain responsible for their businesses, recognize when something needs attention and work more effectively with the professionals who support them.

That is who Larry really is: someone who has spent a career making complicated organizations more understandable—and who is now applying that experience to helping Canadian small-business owners build businesses that are clearer, stronger and better prepared for what comes next.