David Ulrich

Dave Ulrich is a Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL Group a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value. He studies how organizations build capabilities of leadership, speed, learning, accountability, and talent through leveraging human resources. He has helped generate award winning data bases that assess alignment between strategies, organization capabilities, HR practices, HR competencies, and customer and investor results.

Ulrich's work covers the spectrum organization topics such as leadership, talent, human resources, culture, coaching, and change. He has helped many leaders build their personal and organization leadership brand, HR departments and professionals deliver value, and organizations align their culture with customer expectations (e.g., he and a team of colleagues helped GE and the then-CEO Jack Welch to design the bureaucracy cutting Workout program).

With a prodigious output of HR, leadership, and organization related publications to his name, David Ulrich is the co-author of 23 books and he has published over 175 articles. Ulrich emphasizes defining organizations through the capabilities they possess. His work has helped define and shape key capabilities such as change, learning, collaboration, accountability, talent, service, innovation, and efficiency. The outcomes of leadership and HR are the capabilities that an organization possesses that deliver value to customers, investors, and communities.

Although he has been involved in large-scale research projects, most of his writing is characterized by synthesizing complex ideas into frameworks and tools that executives can use. He is a well-traveled speaker, working with groups of all sizes where he is known for engaging the participants, helping to translate the ideas into actions that work for them. His motto is that good teaching is not what he knows, but how his knowledge helps participants do what they do better.

In his latest book The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win (2011), Ulrich, with his psychologist wife Wendy, examines people's motivation for working and what they get out of work.

He edited Human Resource Management 1990-1999 and served on editorial board of four Journals. He sits on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller, and Board of Trustees at Southern Virginia University, and is a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources.