Ron Ashkenas

Ron Ashkenas has been a partner, consultant, and mentor on issues related to organizational change, leadership, and transformation for executives in the private and public sectors and NGOs for over thirty years. He is an emeritus partner at Schaffer Consulting in Stamford, Connecticut. He was part of the team that collaborated with Jack Welch on the transformation of GE in the 1990s. His clients include the World Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Pfizer, and GSK, technology companies like Cisco and Cognizant, Stanford Hospital in California and the MD Anderson Cancer Center, financial services companies such as AIG, JP Morgan Chase, Thomson Reuters, and Zurich Insurance, as well as consumer product businesses including PepsiCo, ConAgra Foods, and P&G. Ron has written numerous articles for the Harvard Business Review and is the author of "Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done" (Harvard Business Press, 2009). He is also the co-author of four other books, including "The Boundaryless Organization" and "The GE Work-Out." He lectures on change management, merger integration, simplification, executive leadership, and innovation at universities and conferences worldwide.