Speaker

For nearly thirty years Jeff has focused on knowledge and performance management initiatives for the private, public and non-profit sectors. Those private sector activities have ranged from providing leadership development for top executives at GE to transforming to improving performance for over 125,000 employees of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Clients have included Shell, Federal Express, Office Depot, MetLife, Boeing, and Volkswagen of North America. Learning and development solutions have ranged from strategic leadership to performance management; from communications & customer service to employee engagement.

In the public sector, Jeff has been focused on creating learning solutions for federal, state and local entities. This included a multi-year focus in increasing management, communications and IT capacity for Federal Student Aid in The U.S. Department of Education. Likewise, he designed strategic initiatives and facilitated change management programming for state groups such as the Iowa State Department of Administrative Services. He spent several years providing leadership-wide development and transformation support for the New York City Department of Finance, improving tax compliance and attitudes toward government. Jeff has provided programming on performance management, leadership and communications for a host of public sector organizations as diverse as U.S. Fish & Wildlife, U.S. Postal Service, U.S. Air Force, Manitoba Provincial Government, and the City of Miami-Dade. Through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, he offers the most comprehensive customer service programming provided to federal workers. His multi-year work with the Microsoft-headquartered community of Sammamish, Washington, has led the town to being named the Friendliest Town in America by Forbes. Additionally, Jeff is CEO for World Class Benchmarking, where he provides strategic thought leadership in building customer-centric and high-performance organizations. He has co-authored Lead With Your Customer, Transform Culture and Brand into World-Class Excellence.

Many of Jeff’s earlier consultant activities were associated with The Disney Institute, a best-practices institution modeled on America’s first corporate university.  While there, Jeff was responsible for providing custom management programming to corporations wanting to benchmark Disney’s best practices. Those models, concepts, and examples were later introduced to corporate America in Be Our Guest, a popular benchmarking title published by The Disney Institute, with a forward by former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner. He has also authored, The Wonderful World of Customer Service at Disney, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios: From Show Biz to Your Biz.