About us
Strategy, brand and communication consultants with 25+ years of experience
Rudolf and Mariska, founders of Athena Associates and The Athena Group, have been working together since university. Already back then, their complementary skills, creative discussions, and openness to a healthy challenge from each other made their cooperation successful and enjoyable. This was rewarded with the acceptance of their Master’s Thesis, Summa Cum Laude.
Mariska Praktiek
Mariska has a background in the international corporate environment in the IT, insurance, finance and oil & gas industries, including over ten years for Shell.
Her responsibilities included communicating strategy and engagement across all corporate functions, working at board level and with functional leaders. She worked on mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, downsizing and re-organisations.
In addition, she has trained numerous leadership teams and managers in leadership communication. The mindfulness-based strengths of some of the senior executives she worked with prompted her interest in this topic, and she has been practising mindfulness since 2005.
Mariska teaches MBSAT (Mindfulness-Based Strategic Awareness Training) and MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction). She has a Master’s in Business Economics.
Rudolf Rodenburg
Rudolf has worked at some of the world’s leading brand and strategy consultancies, including Interbrand, WPP’s Superunion and Omnicom’s TBWA.
His experience ranges from pharma to airlines and from energy to FMCG and finance. His areas of expertise include business strategy, brands, communication strategy, employee engagement and internal branding.
For British Airways, he guided a global brand relaunch and internal roll-out for over 40,000 employees. At SOS Children’s Villages, an NGO present in 130 countries, he worked on global strategy and brand development at board level as Global Communications Director.
Rudolf successfully brings together parties from different cultural and functional backgrounds by using mindfulness to create an open atmosphere and build on strengths and cultural differences.
Rudolf teaches MBSAT (Mindfulness Based Strategic Awareness Training), and he has a Master’s in Business Economics.
