By: AK Infinite
Tom LeNoble has spent decades leading teams at companies like MCI, Palm, and Facebook. He’s worked across startups and Fortune 500s, run global operations, and consulted for early technology companies. Today, his focus has shifted—he coaches executives, leads nonprofit strategy retreats, and works privately with individuals navigating personal and professional transitions. Additionally, he provides operational advisory solutions to tech companies.
LeNoble is the CEO of ACE Coach Training (Academy for Coaching Excellence), a Level 2 ICF-certified training organization focused on ontological coaching—a method that shifts attention away from perceptive, reactive judgment to a client’s adversity and toward how they’re responding in the present. He is also president of Taranga Enterprises, an HR and operational consultancy.
“It’s not therapy. It’s not advice. It’s about how you’re being in relation to your goals, how you’re actually showing up,” he notes. “People get stuck. They think they’re moving forward, but they’ve still got one foot in the past.”
From Early Tech to Coaching Work That Sticks
Coaching, for LeNoble, isn’t a new venture—it’s been quietly integrated into his career for years. In his corporate career, long before coaching had cachet, he studied under psychologist Maria Nemeth and used her frameworks internally while leading customer operations teams. “We didn’t call it coaching,” he notes. “We put it under ‘employee development’ because nobody knew what it was yet.”
His profile of experience includes leadership stints at: Palm, Walmart.com, SupportSpace, SpeedDate. At Facebook, he led customer operations at a time when the company was still focused exclusively on colleges, interviewing directly with Mark Zuckerberg to launch and manage this growing business function. He’s worked with venture-backed CEOs, advised through mergers, and managed large-scale global teams.
His current professional perspective and purpose are largely informed by personal adversity. LeNoble is in his 13th year living with metastatic prostate cancer. He’s candid about it publicly and in his coaching apparatus, as a lens through which he approaches work, mission, and resilience.
Coaching Through Change, Not Crisis
“I coach a lot around risk,” he says. “Not risk in the business sense—risk as in choosing discomfort in service of something better.”
That theme—resilience, forward motion, navigating change—runs through everything he’s building now. LeNoble leads a keynote, “The RiskAbility Factor,” empowering intelligent risk-taking in the face of business adversity. In 2025, LeNoble will release a book titled My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Gowns, and High Heels. It’s part memoir, part reflection, and part call to action. “You’ll have to read the book to understand the heels,” he adds.
Giving Without Credit
Outside of his coaching work, LeNoble is also focused on philanthropy, though until recently, he rarely talked about it publicly. He supports youth and performing arts organizations, funds programs for first-generation college students, and backs small, community-focused nonprofits—often quietly, often through direct relationships. One project in Oakland he supports teaches at-risk boys to play saxophone. “They’re not just learning music,” he says. “They’re learning to commit to something.”
Asked what motivates the giving, he keeps it simple: “I did well. I have the means. I think we have a responsibility to give it back.”
What’s Next
Whether coaching a tech CEO through burnout or guiding a laid-off executive out of inertia, LeNoble’s approach is consistent. He listens for the friction point, the place where forward momentum has slowed or become unclear. Then he starts from there.
“It’s easy to tell yourself a story about why you’re stuck,” he says. “The harder thing is to shift how you’re showing up. But that’s where change starts.”
With a book on the way, a growing public speaking platform, and a client roster that spans nonprofits and startups alike, Tom LeNoble isn’t looking to scale for the sake of visibility. But he is interested in alignment—bringing his writing, speaking, and coaching under one roof while expanding his philanthropic pursuits.
Published by Liz SD.
