Ron is the B. Charles Ames Professor of Management at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University and former Chairman of the Department of Organizational Behavior, consistently ranked one of the best in the world by the Financial Times. He is presently the Faculty Chair of the Fowler Center for Business as Agent for World Benefit. Ron has been honored with the University Award for Outstanding Teacher in the Professional Schools and the Weatherhead School’s Lifetime Service Award. He was the inaugural Stiller Endowed Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry at Champlain College. He received his MS and PhD from the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after completing a BS in Engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 2024 he was honored with the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Educator Award for his contributions to organization change and development education.
The OB Department at CWRU pioneered the first Master of Science degree program in Organizational Development (MOD) in 1975. Ron directed the MOD for over a decade and then led the re-design of MOD into the current Masters in Positive OD (MPOD) and has served as Department Chair for seven years. He has served on the Executive Board of the Academy of Management’s Organization Development & Change (ODC) Division, including serving as PDW Chair, Program Chair, and Division Chair. He also directed Weatherhead’s EMBA program to Business Week’s Top Ten rankings during 12 years as the Program Director.
With 11 books and over 60 articles and chapters, Ron is widely published in the areas of Organizational Development, Appreciative Inquiry, Team Building, Change Management, Executive Development and the role and functioning of the CEO. He is a co-creator of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) theory and method and continues to both apply and study the applications of AI in the field. His most recent books are Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity (Taos Publishing), with Frank Barrett, and Appreciative Team Building with Diana Whitney, Jay Cherney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom (iUniverse).
With Professor David Cooperrider, Ron has co-edited the Journal of Corporate Citizenship. He has conducted the Weatherhead International Certificate Program in Appreciative Inquiry for Business and Society Benefit in Brazil, Belgium, China, India, Australia, Indonesia, France, Sweden and the USA. He directed a world inquiry project to find and disseminate business innovations for mutual benefit of business and society. This inquiry has now grown into a global mobilization of business school students (see Aim2Flourish.com) through the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit and currently houses over 4000 stories of business innovations that also contribute to the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Ron has facilitated and studied large scale, multi-stakeholder change processes in a variety of private and public systems including General Electric, World Vision, ArcelorMittal, Roadway Express, Akzonobel, Lubrizol, Sustainable Cleveland 2019, Smuckers, Belgian Learning Network for Talent Development, Federation of Industries (Brazil), Fairmount Minerals (Covia), Swagelok, Mid-Ohio Foodbank, Genesis Health Systems, Los Angeles Fire Department, Lowes Foods, SAB Miller Latin America, Trinidad Ministry of Justice, Catholic Diocese of Monterey, Canon, National Commercial Bank of Jamaica, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, and the US Navy.
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