CHRISTOPHER R. HANSON

On Wednesday, September 23, 2015 my friend and business partner Christopher R. Hanson died from injuries he sustained from a biking accident in Wisconsin. Chris leaves his wife Cheriann, daughters Lindsay and Kristan Sigourney, his mother, and sister. He was 67 years old.

Chris grew up in Western New York State near Buffalo. He was of Swedish decent and ate Lutefisk to prove it. In high school, he played football and he performed in plays. He loved sports and quickly became a fan of the local sports teams where he lived. Still, he never lost his love for Buffalo.

I met Chris in West Virginia in 1980. He hired my future wife, Lynette Chandler to work in PEPSI the early intervention program he was directing.  Chris liked to say he was the program Director and bus driver. He loved deep power skiing, photography, and fast cars. He was a Behavioral Systems Psychologist before there was a systems program at WVU. Chris was a Ph.D. student of Jon Krapfl and worked in with Jim Noah at the state hospital.

From West Virginia, Chris and Cheriann moved to Boston where he co-authored a four year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to establish integrated services for HIV infected children and their families by providing consultation and training to early childhood agencies located throughout the United States.

In 1991, Chris joined Jon Krapfl and Jim Noah at Corporate and Organization Behavior Analysts, Inc., in Chicago.  He was instrumental in my joining the company in 1992. For five years Chris and I share an office, traveled together, and consulted together. We consulted in law practices, physician practices, hospice facilities, hospitals, and title insurance companies.  Over time we became the leadership and management experts for agents in the title industry.

In 1997, Chris and I established Corporate Behavior Analysts, Ltd., after Jon and Jim retired. Since going off on our own, we have worked with hundreds of title insurance agents, conducted workshops and seminars in more than twenty cities, and we published two business books.

Professionally, Chris was thoughtful and somewhat reserved. He’d show up two hours early for a workshop we had given twenty times before so he could go over the notes he wrote five years earlier. He was an Eagle Scout who believed in being prepared.

Outside of work, friends met a different Chris Hanson. He was out going and fun. He could be zany. He liked to cook and loved wine. He took black and white photographs. He loved straight ahead jazz. He and I went to the Blue Note in NYC every time we consulted there.

He was a person that you liked being around. He had a large number of very close friends.

It is not enough to say he will be missed.

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