Dave Ulrich
Ranked by Business Week as the #1 management educator and listed in Forbes as one of the "world's top five" business coaches
One of the world's leading human resource management educators and consultants - Ulrich has consulted and done research with over half of the Fortune 200.
Hot Topics
- The Leadership Brand
- New business realities for HR
- How HR can link to investors or customers outside the firm
- How HR can help leaders deliver strategy through capabilities...with a focus on talent, change, leadership, brand, collaboration, learning, accountability, customer service, efficiency, innovation, etc.
- How to build an HR strategy and HR organization
- How to ensure that HR professionals have the right competencies to deliver on their roles
Ulrich is highly acclaimed internationally as a business thinker, researcher, writer and teacher. The US based Business Week magazine has rated him as the top management guru, ahead of Porter, Hamel, Peters and Drucker. Ulrich receives top marks because senior executives say he is very practical and does the best job in understanding how companies actually work.
He challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding leadership by shifting the focus to the connection between the attributes and the results of leadership, which leads to a useful new perspective on effective leadership at both the personal and organizational levels.
Ulrich is recognised as a leader in moving human resources from a staff backwater to its new place at the CEO's right hand, along the way helping with the process of building intellectual capital, creating strategic clarity and driving change.
Ulrich urges aspiring leaders at all levels of an organization to strive for excellence in both terms i.e. demonstrate attributes and achieve results. He suggests that much leadership teaching focuses too narrowly on personal attributes such as vision, character and trust, whilst attention to the critical connection between leadership abilities and the desired results is lacking. He believes it is essential that leaders are able to demonstrate results in four key areas, results for employees (human capital), results for the organisation (learning, innovation), results for customers (delight target customers) and results for investors (cash flow).
He is as a Professor of Business at the University of Michigan. Professionally, he studies how organizations build capabilities of speed, learning, collaboration, accountability, talent, and leadership through leveraging human resources. He has helped generate multiple award winning data bases that assess alignment between strategies, human resource practices and HR competencies.
He was the Editor Human Resource Management Journal (1990-1999), served on the editorial board of 4 other Journals, is on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller, is a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources; and co-founder of the Michigan Human Resource Partnership.
Honors include
- Lifetime Achievement in Workplace Learning and Performance (ASTD 2007)
- Most influential person in HR (HR Magazine 2006)
- Ranked as #2 among management thinkers by Executive Excellence in 2004.
- Ranked as #1 management educator and guru by Business Week, 2001.
- George Petipas Memorial Award from World Federation of Personnel Management for lifetime contributions to human resources, 2000.
- Listed by Forbes as one of the “world’s top five” business coaches, 2000.
- “Results-Based Learning,” (with Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman), CLO Magazine, forthcoming.
- "Leadership as a Brand," (with Norm Smallwood), Leadership Excellence, Jan 2007.
- "Making Intangibles Tangible," (with Norm Smallwood and Kurt Sandholtz), Strategic Finance, Dec 2006.
- "Making Intangibles Tangible," (with Norm Smallwood and Kurt Sandholtz), Leadership Excellence, Dec 2006.
- Over 100 articles.
- Leadership Brand (with Norm Smallwood), forthcoming.
- Memo to the CEO: The Leadership Code (with Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman), forthcoming.
- Human Resource Value Proposition (with Wayne Brockbank).
- The Future of Human Resource Management (with Michael Losey and Sue Meisinger).
- Why the Bottom Line Isn’t: How to Build Value Through People and Organization (with Norm Smallwood).
- GE Workout (with Steve Kerr and Ron Ashkenas).
- Human Resources: Business Process Outsourcing (with Edward Lawler, Jac Fitz-enz, James Madden and Regina Maruca)
- HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance (with Brian Becker and Mark Huselid).
- Results Based Leadership: How Leaders Build the Business and Improve the Bottom Line (with Norm Smallwood and Jack Zenger).
- Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results.
- The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organization Structure (with Ron Ashkenas, Steve Kerr and Todd Jick).