Michael T. Kanazawa

Robert H. Miles, PhD, President, Corporate Transformation Resources, is a global thought and practice leader in the fields of corporate transformation and executive leadership. He has served CEOs as the principal process architect in over 30 CEO-led corporate transformations. A summary of the major insights from this experience, titled “Accelerating Corporate Transformations—Don’t Lose Your Nerve!” appeared as a feature article in the January–February 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review and was recently reprinted in the quarterly “Reinvention” issue of HBR OnPoint.

 

Over the past two decades Bob has pioneered an Accelerated Corporate Transformation (ACT) methodology at such leading companies as Apple, Black & Veatch, Florida Rock, General Electric, IBM Global Services, Infineon Technologies, National Semiconductor, Office Depot, PGA Tour, Rockwell, Southern Company, and Symantec, as well as a number of emerging high-tech companies. Bob also is the author or coauthor of a series of books on corporate transformation and organizational effectiveness, including Macro Organizational Behavior, The Organization Life Cycle, Coffin Nails and Corporate Strategies, Managing the Corporate Social Environment,Corporate Comeback, Leading Corporate Transformation: Blueprint for Business Renewal, BIG Ideas to BIG Results : Remake and Recharge Your Company, Fast; and now its sequel BIG Ideas to BIG Results: Leading Corporate Transformation in a Disruptive World.

 

Frequently serving as a Process Architect to executive leaders as they plan, launch, and refocus their corporate transformation efforts, Bob helps new CEOs “take charge” and sitting CEOs launch the next major phase in their organization. A trademark of his approach has been the Rapid, High-engagement, All-employee Cascade, which launches the Execution Phase by quickly focusing everyone in the enterprise on a shared set of business performance and cultural corporate transformation initiatives for breakthrough results.

 

On the Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School faculties for many years, Bob taught in the MBA, doctoral, and senior executive programs. At Harvard he was also Faculty Chairman of an innovative two-week residential program that helped CEOs and their teams plan corporate transformations.

 

He is a cofounder of the Macro Organizational Behavior Society, a convocation of elected global scholars held each year at Harvard Business School. And after a decade of corporate transformation work in Silicon Valley, he briefly returned to academe as the Isaac Stiles Hopkins Distinguished University Professor and Dean of the Faculty to help guide the transformation of the Emory, now Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

 

Bob served for over a decade as a faculty member at both the Stanford Executive Institute and at GE’s Crotonville Operations (where he redesigned and taught all of the executive-level change management modules). He also served on the Editorial Review Boards of Management Science and Administrative Science Quarterly and on the Advisory Board of the Organizational Effectiveness Division of The Conference Board. He was Chairman of the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management.

 

Earlier in his career, Bob was an Operations Analyst at Ford Motor Company, a First Lieutenant (Armor) in the U.S. Army, Special Assistant to the Director of Research, Development and Engineering at U.S. Army Missile Command, and a Project Manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Later in his career he served on the Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

Bob received a BS from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia (where he served for two decades on the Advisory Board) and a PhD in Business Administration from the Kenan- Flagler School at the University of North Carolina.

 

He lives with his wife, Jane, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chatham, Massachusetts. He may be reached at RMiles@CorpTransform.com. His website is www.CorpTransform.

Michael T. Kanazawa, is an entrepreneur and advisor to global corporate leaders in the areas of innovation, strategy and transformation. Based in Silicon Valley, his career has been shaped by creating disruptive innovations and driving strategic transformations with the world’s leading technology companies and global market leading companies. He has also been a founder and owner of two firms that were both successfully built and sold, including the most recent to Ernst & Young (EY), where he serves as a strategy partner and as the global methodology architect of Purpose-Led Transformation.

 

The central concepts in his work are rooted in putting customers at the center and collaborating across disciplines and diverse mindsets to drive innovation, strategy and transformation. Early in his career, Michael worked in the same maze of cubicles as Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams. That experience inspired him to learn from the best leaders who operated more deeply and beyond the “typical” mold of a corporate leader. This has turned into a lifelong quest to build and shape organizations that delight customers in new ways, disrupt industries, and liberate the full capacity of human ingenuity and creativity.

 

Clients have included Silicon Valley growth companies, private equity investors, and global corporations, such as AT&T, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, PG&E, Schlumberger, Symantec, and Verizon. Michael is frequently referenced in national media and often serves as a keynote speaker at corporations, associations, and universities on the topics of innovation and transformation.

 

Michael holds a BA in mathematics and economics from U.C. Santa Barbara and an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. You can follow or reach him at www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkanazawa.