Advisory Board

Robert S. Kaplan is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He joined the HBS faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983. Kaplan received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Stuttgart (1994), Lodz (2006), and Waterloo (2008).

Kaplan’s research, Executive Education teaching, and consulting focus on linking cost and performance management systems to strategy implementation. His current research focuses on two topics: measuring and managing organizational risk and, in a joint project with Michael Porter, measuring the cost of delivering health care and linking patient costs to outcomes.

Kaplan was co-developer of both activity-based costing and the Balanced Scorecard. He has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 150 papers including 23 in Harvard Business Review. Recent books include The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, the fifth Balanced Scorecard book co-authored with David Norton, and Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing with Steve Anderson. His previous books with Norton include Alignment, Strategy Maps, named as one of the top ten business books of 2004 by Strategy & Business and amazon.com, The Strategy-Focused Organization, named by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as the best international business book for year 2000, and The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, which has been translated into 24 languages and won the 2001 Wildman Medal from the American Accounting Association for its impact on practice. He also co-authored Cost and Effect, Implementing Activity-Based Cost Management, and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, which received the American Accounting Association Seminal Contributions to Literature Award in 2007.

Elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2006, Kaplan received the Lifetime Contribution Award for Distinguished Contributions to Advancing the Management Accounting Profession from the Institute of Management Accountants in 2008, and the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association (AAA) in 2006. He received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 from the AAA, the 1994 CIMA Award from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK) for "Outstanding Contributions to the Accountancy Profession," and the 2001 Distinguished Service Award from the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) for contributions to the practice and academic community. Kaplan speaks globally on performance and cost management systems.

Jeffrey Pfeffer has been with Stanford since 1979. He is the author or co-author of 15 books including:

• Leadership B.S.: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
• The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First
• Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t
• The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action
• Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management
• And more than 150 articles and book chapters
• In March, 2018, HarperCollins will publish Pfeffer’s latest book, Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—And What We Can Do About It

Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from Stanford. He began his career at the business school at the University of Illinois and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Pfeffer has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University, London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, and for the past 12 years a visitor at IESE in Barcelona.

From 2003-2007, Pfeffer wrote a monthly column, “The Human Factor,” for the 650,000-person circulation business magazine, Business 2.0 and from 2007-2010, he wrote a monthly column providing career advice for Capital, a leading business and economics magazine in Turkey. Pfeffer has also written for Fortune.com, BNET, the Washington Post, BloombergBusinessWeek.com, and is an Influencer on LinkedIn.

Pfeffer currently serves on the board of directors of Berlin Packaging, on the advisory board for Collective Health, and on the board of the nonprofit Quantum Leap Healthcare. In the past he has served on the boards of Resumix, Unicru, and Workstream, all human capital software companies, Audible Magic, an internet company, SonoSite, a NASDAQ company designing and manufacturing portable ultrasound machines, and the San Francisco Playhouse, a non-profit theater.

Pfeffer has presented seminars in 39 countries throughout the world as well as doing consulting and providing executive education for numerous companies, associations, and universities in the United States.

Jeffrey Pfeffer has won the Richard D. Irwin Award presented by the Academy of Management for scholarly contributions to management and numerous awards for his articles and books. He was listed in the top 25 management thinkers by Thinkers 50 and as one of the Most Influential HR International Thinkers by HR Magazine. In November, 2011, he was presented with an honorary doctorate degree from Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

Dan Adams is the president of The AIM Institute and author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth. He founded AIM in 2005, and has delivered hundreds of Blueprinting and LaunchStarworkshops around the world. Dan coaches ~200 client-team web-conferences annually, continually learning and refreshing his teaching. He enjoys meeting with company executives, helping them chart their course for sustainable organic growth.

Prior to founding AIM, Dan worked in the chemical industry–at Lubrizol, Noveon, and BFGoodrich–where he built the Blueprinting framework from the “ground up”. He is a chemical engineer and holder of many patents and innovation awards, including a listing in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Adams was also head of strategic planning and held numerous roles in marketing, manufacturing, finance, business development and management.

Dan received a BS in Chemical Engineering and MBA in Finance. Dan's work with DuPont (as a lead client) led to a novel online training/implementation model, for which he and his co-author received the “best article of the year” award from the Product Development and Management Association. An award-winning speaker, he has been a frequent guest lecturer at Wharton’s Executive MBA program and similar programs in the US and Europe.

In 36 years of marriage, Dan and his wife, Carol, started many projects that took longer than expected. These included publishing a set of 300 children’s science activities, writing a book on parenting, and building a large home addition… by reading books on framing. Dan and Carol have three married daughters, three granddaughters and one grandson. Dan enjoys backpacking, running, indoor rock-climbing–with substantial padding below–and spending time with his family.

Greg Galle is co-founder of Future, a Silicon Valley Innovation Product and Services company. Future helps leaders and their teams conceive of disruptive solutions to their most important challenges through their cloud-based Think Wrong Lab, Think Wrong Master Classes, Think Wrong Workshops and Think Wrong Partnerships.

Greg is co-author of Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters (published 1 Nov, 2016). He has over 25 years of experience applying Think Wrong Practices to a broad array of private, public, and civil sector innovation challenges including product, service, process, systems, policy, experience, engagement, talent, professional development, and culture innovation.

Greg co-founded C2 Group with fellow Future co-founder John Bielenberg, prior to which he served for seven years as the Director of Brand and Marketing Strategy for Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors, Barclays Global Investors, and Barclays PLC. There he was responsible for brand development, product and business innovation, and service and experience delivery across 200 businesses in over 70 countries. At Aaron Marcus and Associates, Greg’s clients included NASA, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, NCR, and Intel. Greg also serves on the board of Not For Sale, is an advisor to Fuse Corps, and a board member emeritus of Hope Street Group.

A. Parasuraman ("Parsu") is a Professor and Holder of the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing (endowed by the Burger King Corporation) and Director of PhD Programsat the School of Business, University of Miami. He teaches and does research in the areas of services marketing, service-quality measure¬ment and improvement, and the role of technology in marketing to and serving customers.

In 1988 Dr. Parasura¬m¬an was selected as one of the "Ten Most Influential Figures in Quality" by the editorial board of The Quality Review, co-published by the American Quality Foundation and the Ameri¬can Society for Quality Control. He has received many distinguished teaching and research awards, including multiple Best Professor Awards given by Executive and Regular MBA classesand the Provost’s Award for Scholarly Research at the University of Miami.

In 1998 he received the American Marketing Association’s "Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award" [an annual award bestowed upon one individual who has had a sustained and far-reaching impact on the field]. He received the Academy of Marketing Science’s "Outstanding Marketing Educator Award" in 2001 and was designated as a "Distinguished Fellow" of the Academy in 2004.

He has also been named to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (U.K.)'s "Guru Gallery," which profiles the 50 leading marketing thinkers worldwide. In 2005 he received a "Distinguished Alumnus Award" from IIT-Madras, his undergraduate alma mater.

In 2008 the e-TQM College (now Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University) in Dubai established "The Parasuraman Service Excellence Research Prize," an annual award to foster more scholarly research throughout the Middle East region. In 2009 the Society for Marketing Advances honored him with the "Elsevier Distinguished Scholar" award.

In 2011 Maastricht University in the Netherlands conferred upon him an Honorary Doctorate degree. He is the recipient of the 2012 Paul D. Converse Award for significant scholarly contributions to marketing and the 2013 Gil Churchill Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Research.In 2016 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Marketing Association.

Dr. Parasuraman has published over 130 articles in scholarly journals and has served as editor of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (1997-2000) and the Journal of Service Research (2005-2009). He also serves on the editorial review boards of ten journals. He has authored several books, consulted with many companies, and conducted dozens of executive seminars on service quality, customer satisfaction and the role of technology in service delivery in many countries.

Ron brings a combination of corporate and entrepreneurial experience to his consulting activities. He spent 28 years as a technologist (32 Us Patents), technology manager and Director of New Business development at Air Products, where he led the innovation efforts for the corporation. He has also served as the CEO of a solar materials startup (PPT Research) and continues to be involved in the materials and energy sectors as a board member for Primet Precision Materials and formerly on the board of advisors for STEM, a San Francisco based Energy Company. He is also a principal in a technology accelerator in Santiago, Chile where he works with technology companies in the mining sector to guide them in becoming global technology suppliers.

In his consulting practice, he works with a diversified group of companies to guide them in the development of their innovation capabilities. He has also been a lecturer at the Wharton Business School and is currently a visiting scholar, where he teaches classes in the EMBA program and Executive Education programs for companies that include Siam Cement, BP, DSM and Lincoln Financial. He is also a member of the faculty for the Corporate Entrepreneurial Leadership program and the Danish Technical University. He splits his time between Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, AZ.

Ron holds a B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry. He has also authored 22 papers, most recently in the Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.

Ajay is the CEO for one of UAEs leading higher education holding companies with a significant investment from GEMS/Varkey Group. During his 27 year career he has worked in direct-to-consumer business as well as B2B businesses at leadership level roles. In his early career at American Express (1989-2001) he was the head of marketing and business development for the consumer card business in India and was a significant contributor to launching a locally billed card business in India. He was awarded the Chairman’s Award for Quality for this contribution.

Ajay was the founder Vice President of ABN AMRO Bank Credit Cards (2011-2004) where he built the bank’s credit card business in India from scratch to become one of the top multinational credit cards brands within two years of the launch.. He has also headed Reader’s Digest (2004-2005) business in India. He was also recognized by the Indian media industry as the ‘Best Media Marketer of the Year’.

At McGraw-Hill Education (2005-2014) Ajay led the digital transformation of the business. For his efforts in growing the McGraw-Hill business he was awarded the company’s highest individual honor – Excellence in Leadership Award.

Ajay iis passionate about education and the impact this sector has on the society and economies.

Ajay is an Engineering graduate from the renowned Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and a top ranker from one of India’s leading business schools - Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi University. He has received the prestigious National Talent Scholarship (NTS) from the Indian government throughout his secondary school and college education.

Since over 20 years Frank Beckmann is a successful senior manager and executive director in international companies. He was a CFO in the sectors of medical supplies, aviation and space industry, media, mobility, real estate and service industry for leading renowned brands including CinemaxX, Hamburg, Germany, Q-Park, Düsseldorf, Germany, Eckes-Granini GmbH & Co KG, Nieder-Olm, Germany, Oiltanking GmbH, Hamburg, Germany, B.Braun Medical (HK) Ltd., Hongkong, Verlag E.F. Beckmann KG, Lehrte, Germany, and Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG, Munich, Germany.

He is focused on building an effective financial organization, process optimization, realizing efficient change management and re-shaping of business models. His core competence lies on financial management, turnaround, strategic development, cost efficiency, CSR, stakeholder communication, team development and coaching as well as finance and controlling. Frank Beckmann has a strong command in optimizing international business due to intensive work experience in Asia and realizes sustainable value increase.

He is an inspiring leader & CFO, marked by distinctive strategic and financial expertise in international business development based on quality and brand building. He is currently an international Specialist and Consultant in Smart Parking & Mobility.

Sandeep is currently COO of IDFC Mutual Fund. In his almost 28 year career Sandeep has been involved in Financial Services on the Operations side and has worked in both small and large companies including a stint in Singapore.

He was part of Stock Holding Corporation of India Ltd ( SHCIL ) for almost 8 years where he was part of the team that was the biggest participant in the Depository Revolution which was ushered in Indian Capital Markets. He was instrumental in helping design systems which catered to both the Institutional as well as Retail clients. SHCIL became the largest Depository Participant in India with over 100 offices.

Later as Head Operations for Sharekhan, Sandeep was part of the team that was amongst the 1st players in the Online Stock Transactions in India. Sharekhan today is a leading player in the country.

With JP Morgan , Sandeep was again at the forefront of the huge Outsourcing Boom in India where he was 1 of the earliest employees of the JP Morgan Captive business in India helping it scale from just a handful of employees to almost 10,000 employees managing large complex projects and a big contributor to local company development.

In IDFC Mutual Fund Sandeep has led digitization efforts helping in building a world class transaction facility for clients. He was also involved in the start up team for IDFC Bank building the Treasury Operations business from scratch to where it is now.

Sandeep is passionate about education and primary health care believing it to be crucial to finally deliver for India in its growth potential.

Sanjay Mathur, aged 52 years, is a Managing Director of the Company since 1 April, 2007. He is a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical) from Punjab University, Chandigarh and has also done Advanced Management Programme from Melbourne Business School, Master of Marketing from Monash University, Australia and holds a Diploma in Financial Management (Dip FM) from ACCA, U.K. Sanjay Mathur has undergone numerous leadership and management development training programmes during his career. He has a wide-ranging experience across various functions and has worked with J.K. Synthetics Ltd, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. and the Shell Group. He was the Supply Chain & Industrial Sales Manager and General Manager (acting) of a Shell JV in the Middle East between 1998 and 2003. In 2003 Sanjay Mathur took over as Managing Director of Pennzoil-Quaker State India Limited (Pennzoil), Mumbai after its acquisition by Shell in October 2002.

From 2015, Sanjay has been appointed as member of the Foundry Executive Committee managing the Foundry (Foseco) business unit of the Vesuvius Group. Responsible for Managing India and South East Asia Region (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam & Philippines) with combined turnover of £65 million and a workforce of more than 500 people. On Board of 5 companies and responsibility of Foseco India Limited plc. listed on NSE and BSE, manufacturing footprint of 7 manufacturing plants, several outsourced product vendors, a portfolio of 600+ direct customers, dealer networks and 400+ products. Reportees include functional heads of Finance, HR, Marketing & Technology, Sales and Supply Chain in India & ASEAN CEO.

Shah Nawaz is the Regional Operations Director for Johnson Controls International for Middle East & Africa. Johnson Controls is a global technology company in the fields of HVAC, Building automation and Power solutions.

Though qualified as an associate member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India in 1987 and as a fellow member in 1994, he shifted from Finance to his chosen domain of Operations in 2006 and has since held positions in Customer Services, Project Management, Quality, Training, Process Engineering and Business Operations.

Shah has presented papers in various professional and corporate forums in India and abroad on various topics including Finance, Contracts Law, Supply chain & Logistics.

In his personal time, he is a keen student of comparative religion, racial relations and right wing extremism. Shah lives In Dubai.

Dale Pearce is an international consultant in strategy, strategy execution and innovation. Following the development of a successful strategic HR firm in New Zealand Dale was invited to join The Palladium Group as an affiliate and then as a Principal for APAC. Over the past 4 years Dale has been working with Imaginatik, global leader in innovation management software and several international tech firms to enable ecosystem centric business models. These models reflect a new competitive reality whereby value will be shaped less by firm specific strategy and more by business ecosystems. Ecosystem value involves four principals:

• Identifying systemic, multi-actor opportunities to create economic and social value
• Mobilising and aligning complementary partners
• Obtaining seed and scale up-financing
• Implementing a measurement and governance system

Dale is currently working on a national Food and Beverage ecosystem model designed to deliver economic, environmental and social value.

Ted Jackson is a founder and managing partner with Ascendant Strategy Management Group. Ted has worked closely with Drs. Kaplan and Norton, developers of Balanced Scorecard management system, since 1999. At Ascendant he is an engagement leader supporting many types of organizations. His focus is in helping organizations move from concept to implementation using the Balanced Scorecard management framework.

Prior to Ascendant, Ted was a Vice President at Balanced Scorecard Collaborative. He was an active consultant and facilitator for 9 years with BSCol. He has trained many Hall of Fame organizations including the U.S. Army, Bahrain Ministry of Works, Marriot Vacation Clubs, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Before BSCol, Ted worked at ICF International, an engineering and environmental consulting firm. At ICF, Ted’s team helped the EPA develop the Energy Star program and worked with organizations to reduce their energy consumption.

Ted has worked in the nonprofit and mission-driven sector as well as with for-profit organizations. His recent clients have included Pacific Gas and Electric, Chesterfield Utilities, APR Supply Company, Atlanta Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District, the City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the City of Fort Collins, Colorado. He is also responsible for sales and customer support of ClearPoint Strategy, the Ascendant-recommended strategy management software solution.