Barba A. Hickman is Founder and President of Applied Clarity, Inc., a Colorado consulting firm that helps companies, teams and individual executives uncover and eliminate barriers to growth. Hickman is a certified facilitator and coach with a 20-year history of success in building, leading and serving on focused, high-performance teams. She has served as a senior executive, board director, and business consultant or leadership coach for over 30 companies. Barba’s employment background includes senior leadership responsibility for the following corporate functions in multi-billion dollar companies: corporate relations, corporate marketing, strategic customer relations, public relations, analyst and industry relations, employee relations, and strategic alliances.

As a skilled leader and facilitator, Barba begins each project with a customized survey/audit to reveal current perceptions, uncover existing issues and expose untapped opportunities. She delivers conclusions and recommendations drawn from that audit to help clients create a rigorous action plan that will ensure the findings are quickly and fully incorporated into team and individual deliverables. Follow-up audits consistently validate program success.

She also uses her facilitation and negotiation skills to drive global market acceptance for new technologies. She is the former chairperson for various U.S. and ISO technology standards committees, and was honored by the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) for her contributions to the worldwide advancement of automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID).

In addition to her professional responsibilities, Barba has also served on the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Boulder Valley Schools, as President of the StorageTek Foundation, and as a regional or corporate lead for several charitable organizations including Make-a-Wish Foundation, Habitat for Humanity and United Way.

Barba holds degrees in business and education from the University of Central Missouri where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and received the Outstanding Graduate Award from the College of Business & Economics.