< back Charlene Haykel is a strategic analyst and writer with 37 years’ experience in information analysis and corporate communications. She started The Haykel Group in 2004 after building and managing a simplified communications practice at Addison, a New York business communications firm. Charlene first focused on the problem of complex communications in 1988 when she joined Siegel & Gale to introduce their then-emerging simplification specialty across North America. Starting in 1993, she successively served as principal at two agencies, Blackburn Young Haykel in Westport, CT and Simplify, a company she co-founded in New York City. Both businesses gave her opportunities to link marketing, branding and customer service issues with simplification theory and practice. What emerged from her work was a prescribed methodology for simplifying customer communications across product and division lines of large corporations. Her proprietary process, MacrosimplificationTM, dramatically improves the quality and clarity of customer communications while also saving companies millions of dollars. Charlene has spoken extensively on simplification principles and processes and on issues of transparency in investor communications for such organizations as the Investment Company Institute; the Conference Board; the Institute for International Research; the Professional Insurance Marketing Association; the Insurance Marketing Communicators Association; the Life Communicators Association and the Financial Communications Forum. She earned a BA in English from Daemen College, Buffalo, NY and an MA in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.