Greg Burns
senior vice president, Human Resources
Allstate Insurance Company
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Greg Burns is a senior vice president in Human Resources. In this role he leads the Client Partnership organization, which provides strategic HR support to Allstate’s business areas. Greg also serves as HR business partner for the president of The Allstate Corporation, and president, Emerging Businesses.
Greg has a deep knowledge of the business, extensive field and corporate experience, and a proven ability to collaborate and influence to drive business results. He brings a diverse background and unique perspective to HR.
Greg joined Allstate in 1985. His Allstate career has included a variety of roles in Claims, HR and Business Insurance. As the regional commercial manager for the Northeast Regional Commercial Center in New York, he was responsible for the profit and loss for the Commercial Center. Most of his career has been in HR, with roles supporting Business Insurance, Allstate Personal Property & Casualty, the Illinois Region, the Southern California Region, Encompass, and Allstate Personal Lines Eastern and Western Territories. In 2012, he was promoted to senior vice president, with responsibility for HR’s field organization and Claims support. He took on his current position in January of 2015.
Greg earned a bachelor’s degree in Finance from the University of South Florida and an MBA from the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his CPCU in 2007.
Greg is a board member for Countryside Association and the Lake County Workforce Investment Council.
Mark David Jones
chief operations officer
World Class Benchmarking
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Mark is an acclaimed consultant – having worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies in six of the seven continents of the world over the past two decades. As an author and highly demanded speaker, Mark has an innovative, results-focused passion for helping people make a difference.
Mark first joined the Walt Disney World Resort® in 1978, working in a wide variety of leadership roles. After more than ten years, Mark left to establish The Consultant Network, eventually leading over 60 business consultants.
In 1992, during his doctoral studies, Mark was recruited to lead the consulting team at the Federal Aviation Administration’s national training headquarters. Mark played a key role in the Department of Transportation’s organizational redesign – spearheading initiatives such as executive development, assessment and design, change dynamics, self-managed/directed work teams, and train-the-trainer programs.
Mark returned to the Walt Disney World Resort® in 1996 to help lead the transformation of the Disney Institute Business Programs. While in this role, Mark was in charge of Leadership, Creativity & Innovation, and Quality Service initiatives. He also served externally as the senior project manager for numerous highly successful large-scale organizational initiatives for leading domestic and international corporations – many of which are showcased in the Disney-published book Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service. In recognition of his contribution to the Disney organization, Mark was nominated for the prestigious “Partner’s in Excellence” award – Disney’s highest regarded corporate award.
Currently, as Chief Operating Officer of World Class Benchmarking, Mark leads a network of experts from the world’s most renowned companies in implementing organizational transformation.
Mark’s best-selling book, Lead With Your Customer: Transform Culture and Brand into World-Class Excellence showcases what world-class organizations do to attain and sustain extraordinary results. He is also one of the contributing authors in the renowned ASTD Leadership Handbook – showcasing thought leadership from “a who’s who of leadership experts”.
J. Jeff Kober
chief executive officer
World Class Benchmarking
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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.