Jeffrey teaching the Five Foundations for Accomplishment
HI, I’m Jeffrey Ford, and I am an expert on personal leadership effectiveness at work. As a Professor of Management in the Max M. Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, I design and teach courses on personal leadership effectiveness. Leading and Managing Change, an MBA course, focuses on how to be personally effective when engaged in implementing a change and has students work on real changes in their places of work. Mastery in Execution, another MBA course, is based on the Five Foundations of Accomplishment and develops practical skills in each of the five elements by having students produce a real improvement in their personal effectiveness at work. During the Mastery course, students increase their effectiveness over 20% points (e.g., from 70% to 90%) on average.
I also lead workshops for organizations, professional groups, and associations on personal leadership effectiveness which are based on my research, teaching experience, and two books. Deadline Busting: How to be a Star Performer in Your Organization (iUniverse, 2005) provides 85 practical proven tips on being more personally effective at work. This book has been called “the best desktop coach I know of for coaching on maintaining your integrity and in honing your leadership skills” by Michael Jensen, Jessie Isidor Strauss Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School. The Four Conversations: Daily Communication that Gets Results (Berrett-Koehler, 2009) identifies four conversations that underlie personal leadership effectiveness and was awarded the Best Management Book of 2009 by 800-CEO-READ. Both of these books are used in my classes.
I hold a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Maryland, an M.B.A. from Ohio State, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Ohio State. Prior to joining the Fisher College of Business, I served on the faculties of Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey and the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University. My articles on personal leadership effectiveness in the conduct of change have been published in the Harvard Business Review and in Organizational Dynamics. I also have numerous academic articles that provide new frameworks for improved leader effectiveness during change that have been published in the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Organizational Change Management, and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
