“HR must give value or give notice.”

Dave Ulrich’s professional focus has addressed questions on how organizations add value to customers and investors through both leadership and strategic human resource practices. In the human resource area, he and his colleagues have worked to redefine and upgrade HR. With his colleagues Wayne Brockbank and Jon Younger, he has articulated how the modern HR organization can be organized into shared services, centers of expertise, and business partners (HR Value Proposition). He has also co-directed research on over 40,000 respondents about the competencies required for successful HR professionals (HR Competencies); in addition, he has helped shape thinking on how to transform HR practices so that they are aligned to customer needs and integrated around organization capabilities (HR Transformation). In the leadership area, Norm Smallwood and Ulrich have worked to focus on the outcomes of effective leadership (Results-Based Leadership); they have also shown how leadership will increase customer share by creating a leadership brand within the company (Leadership Brand). Their work also illustrates that investing in leadership will increase shareholder value (How Leaders Build Value). Their recent work (with Kate Sweetman) synthesizes the thicket of leadership competency models into a unified view of leadership (The Leadership Code).

Dave Ulrich is a professor of business at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and co-founder of The RBL Group. He has written fifteen books covering topics in HR and Leadership, is currently on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller, is a Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources, and is on the Board of Trustees of Southern Virginia University.

Dave 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.

Dave Ulrich has been ranked the #1 Management Educator & Guru by BusinessWeek, selected by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative and creative leaders, named the most influential person in HR by HR Magazine for three years, and has been on the World’s Top 50 Business Thinkers List since 2007. He is also the 2010 recipient of the Kirk Englehardt Exemplary Business Ethics Award.