Michael Beer

For more than 40 years, management expert Michael Beer has devoted his career to helping senior business leaders build high commitment, high performing companies. Today, some of the world’s most innovative companies and their leaders are turning to Beer and his colleagues for change strategies and initiatives to help foster commitment and long term business performance within their respective organizations through a tried and simple set of leadership and organizational processes.

Viewed against the implementation of business strategy, Beer’s work explores how the way people are organized and led can often be misaligned with objectives of the company. He looks for places where honest conversations can remove silent barriers to helping better align these critical components.

Through his renowned speaking and teaching style and broad experiences in research and consulting activities, Beer effectively focuses on how to build a resilient organization for long-lasting high commitment and performance. His work emphasizes organizational change – how managers can lead a transformation in how the business is led, organized and managed. With years of experience teaching senior executives in Harvard Business School’s renowned Advanced Management Program, Beer is a compelling and highly interactive speaker and teacher. While he boasts an incredible resume as a professor and consultant, Beer’s style is much like a teacher who helps guide his audience in a thoroughly engaging fashion, rather than like a professor steeped in formality. This is a great teacher with a great deal to share with audiences who are searching for better ways to lead organize and manage for greater effectiveness, commitment and performance.

An award-winning author, he has written nine books, including The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, which won the Johnson, Smith & Kinsley Award for the best book on executive leadership of 1990 and was a finalist for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award, and Managing Human Assets (1984), a ground breaking book that was first to frame human resource (HR) management as a general management responsibility.

Beer’s forthcoming book, High Commitment, High Performance (Jossey-Bass, Summer 2009), provides a roadmap to much needed change in how senior management leads and organizes the enterprise and its people. He unearths the relationship between organizational, human and competitive challenges and demonstrates how managers at all levels can navigate through these most trying economic times to build a strong high commitment, high performance organization.

Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School (HBS) where he has taught many executive education programs including the Advanced Management Program; the International Senior Management Program; Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Decision Making; and Ethical Values. He also founded and led executive programs in Managing Organizational Effectiveness and Change and Strategic Human Resource Management. In the early 1980s, he developed the first required course in human resource management taught at a business school.

Before joining the HBS faculty, Beer founded and served as Director of Organizational Research and Development at Corning Inc. This pioneering internal consulting and research group partnered with senior leaders in the developing effective high commitment, high performance organizations decades before companies recognized that human and social capital are a major source of competitive advantage. The group helped Corning’s managers make a number of significant innovations in management at the corporate and business unit level that became well known.

Beer is also co-founder and chairman of TruePoint, a research based consultancy that partners with senior executives who aspire to transform their organization into a high commitment and performance system. He and his TruePoint colleagues have consulted and studied firms in many industry sectors including high technology, manufacturing, financial service, healthcare, hospitality, retail and professional service firms.

A prized management expert, Beer has received several awards from professional associations including the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award for his career long pursuit of practical and actionable knowledge, the prestigious Michael Losey Research Award from the Society for Human Resource Management, and the Distinguished Professional Contributions Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He is a fellow of the Academy of Management, the National Academy of Human Resources, the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association. Additional professional activities include membership on the editorial boards of several journals.

Articles:
• The Uncompromising Leader Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2008

• Uncompromising Leadership in Tough Times HBS Working Knowledge, February 9, 2009

• How to Have an Honest Conversation about your Strategy Harvard Business Review, February 2004

• Cracking the Code of Change Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2001

Books:

• "High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage" , Jossey-Bass, August 2009

Comments and Accolades
"Mike Beer has been of tremendous importance to me in developing Whitbread to be a high commitment high performance company. The response from my group of senior executives to his teaching and speaking to a larger group of several hundred managers at a subsequent event was very enthusiastic. Mike is a knowledgeable, energetic and engaging teacher and speaker who connects with his audience."

-- Alan Parker, CEO Whitbread Group 

"Thank you for the contribution you made to our senior leaders. Your presentation and case study had an important impact on our organization. Many leaders left with new insights about how to transform our organization into a high performance, high commitment organization and a greater sense of conviction that this kind of change was possible. Your inspiration kicked off a process that resulted in a dramatic reduction in associate turnover, improved customer service, a reversal of sales trends and a 50% improvement in our stock price. I will always be grateful for your getting the ball rolling.”

-- Peter Dunn, former CEO Steak n Shake

“Whether it be before CEOs at the Yale CEO College, top management committees in challenging introspective programs on change, creative strategic retreats, adversarial senior leadership teams post merger, or the demanding groups on the Harvard campus Mike Beer never misses the group’s learning needs. I have known Mike Beer for over thirty years and as a colleague have seen him, first hand, mesmerize executive groups at all levels – relying upon no canned jokes, contrived classroom pyrotechnics of manipulation, or gimmicks of any sort. Instead, Mike uses riveting vivid descriptions to glean core lessons in compelling practical insights informed by years of study and experience in actual profound organizational transformations. Rivaling Mike ability to lecture is his unrivaled strength as a highly energetic, trusting, skilled facilitator where he can draw out the most sensitive key issues by great listening, useful framing, and pioneering insights on organizational change and fitness. No matter what the program is , when I see Mike walk in the door, I KNOW it will be a huge success.”

--Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Senior Associate Dean for Executive Programs, Yale School of Management
 

To inquire about rates and speech availability for Michael Beer, please contact:

Daniel R. Stern
Stern + Associates
11 Commerce Drive
Cranford, New Jersey 07016
office: (908) 276-4344
danny@sternassociates.com