Joseph H. Boyett is cofounder of Boyett & Associates, an Atlanta-based consulting and research firm specializing in helping companies understand and implement state-of-the-art leadership and organizational practices. He has worked with companies such as IBM, BP Oil, Merck & Company, EDS, and BellSouth on leading-edge strategies for securing competitive advantage. Dr. Boyett is an internationally recognized expert and author on such topics as leadership, change management, high performance work teams, and innovative compensation practices such as gainsharing and pay-for-skill. Dr. Boyett is the author or co-author of seventeen books including the highly praised Workplace 2000, The Guru Guide™ series and Won’t Get Fooled Again, a voter’s guide to picking better political leaders. His most recent book is Getting Things Done in Washington: Lessons for Progressives from Landmark Legislation. [See http://www.jboyett.com for more on Dr. Boyett’s books, including excerpts.]
Prior to founding Boyett & Associates in 1992, Dr. Boyett was a Principal with the international consulting firm A.T. Kearney. While at Kearney, Dr. Boyett helped establish the company's global Executive Issues Center of Excellence which was responsible for researching leading edge quality and productivity improvement methodologies. Dr. Boyett developed Kearney's world-wide methodology for implementing Total Quality Management in addition to Kearney's internal and client training programs on TQM, The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and ISO 9000.
Prior to joining A.T. Kearney in 1990, Dr. Boyett was Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Tarkenton Conn & Company, an Atlanta-based Total Quality Management consulting firm. He served as Tarkenton's senior, executive-level consultant on productivity and quality measurement, team performance systems, and pay-for-performance compensation systems such as gainsharing and pay-for-skill. He regularly conducted assessments of management and compensation practices for such companies as Sara Lee Corporation, Bell Canada, TRW and GTE and advised senior executives in these companies on change implementation strategies. Dr. Boyett designed a measurement process for white-collar/knowledge workers which was adopted by Ford Motor Company, among other major U.S. and Canadian companies.
Dr. Boyett is the coauthor of Maximum Performance Management (Glenbridge Publishing Ltd., 1988 and Capstone (UK), 1995), a guide to implementing innovative management and compensation practices which was endorsed by the American Productivity and Quality Center, the Quality and Productivity Management Association, the Association for Quality and Participation and many other U.S. productivity and quality associations. A second edition of Maximum Performance Management was published in 1993.
Dr. Boyett's next book, Workplace 2000: The Revolution Reshaping American Business was published by New American Library/Penguin USA in 1991. It has been called a "confident prophecy," a "visionary classic," a "provocative forecast," and a "must-read" by reviewers in Fortune, Working Woman, The Executive and elsewhere. Workplace 2000 is currently in its fourteenth printing.
In 1993, Dr. Boyett coauthored a book with executives from IBM that told the inside story of that company's struggle to reinvent itself. The Quality Journey tells the story of IBM Rochester's pursuit of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and how the unit's winning that award in 1990 impacted the rest of IBM. Publisher's Weekly called The Quality Journey "one of the year's top business books."
Dr. Boyett's fifth book, Beyond Workplace 2000 (NAL/Dutton April 1995), updated the American business revolution and outlined the steps American businesses and individuals will be forced to take to succeed in the twenty-first century. Reviewers praised Beyond Workplace 2000 as a "terrific job of reporting," that is "thoughtful and imaginative" and "must reading" for everyone seeking to make the transition to the new world of work.
Dr. Boyett’s sixth book, The Guru Guide™: The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers, was published by John Wiley & Sons in May 1998. The Guru Guide™ is a detailed critical appraisal of the most significant contributions to management thought from 79 of the world’s greatest management writers and thinkers. In it Dr. Boyett, with his coauthor and wife Jimmie Boyett, outlines the most important developments in thinking about leadership, managing change, the learning organization, high-performance teams, business strategy, motivating people, and organizational structure from the 1980s and 1990s. The Guru Guide™ has been published in eight foreign translations including, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese, and Russian.
Four sequels to The Guru Guide™ have been completed. The Guru Guide™ to Entrepreneurship was published in December 2000. It is a compilation and synthesis of entrepreneurial know-how on everything from picking the right business to developing business plans to managing money and exploiting the Internet from 70 of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos, Jim Clark, Warren Buffett, Anita Roddick, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and many more. BusinessWeek Online called it “the maverick’s manual for entrepreneurial success.”
The Guru Guide™ to the Knowledge Economy was published in June 2001. It includes a detailed synthesis of advice from 115 of the world’s greatest management thinkers on such topics as electronic commerce, knowledge management, customer relationship management, globalization, and business ethics.
The Guru Guide™ to Marketing was published in 2003. It provides a concise guide to the best ideas of 62 of the world’s greatest marketing experts including Philip Kotler, Jack Trout, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Don Peppers.
The Guru Guide™ to Money Management was published in the fall of 2003. It is a synthesis of the advice of over 60 of America’s top personal finance and investment advisers including such notables as Warren Buffet, Arthur Levitt, Peter Lynch, and the Motley Fools, David and Tom Gardner.
In addition to these books, Dr. Boyett is the co-author of two highly praised guides to implementing major changes in compensation practices: The Gainsharing Design Manual (ASJA Press, 2004) and The Skill-Based Pay Design Manual (ASJA Press, 2004). Also, he has written numerous articles on innovative management and compensation practices for such publications as Working Woman, National Productivity Review, National Productivity Report, Innovative Leader, Communications Briefings, Employee Benefit News, Boardroom Reports, Behavioral Sciences Newsletter, Personnel Report for the Executive, Quality and Productivity Management Association Update, On the Horizon, and Progressive Grocer. Between 1988 and 1991, he wrote a regular feature article on management for Entrepreneur Magazine. A collection of these articles was published in paperback in 1991 by New American Library/Plume as The Competitive Edge: Essential Business Skills for Entrepreneurs.
Dr. Boyett has spoken before such diverse groups as the American Management Association, the Japan Management Association, the Quality and Productivity Management Association, the National Association of Industrial Engineers, the Association for Quality and Participation, as well as serving as a member of a four-person Office of the Future “Mastermind” keynote panel at the Gartner Group Symposium ITXPO99. He was a featured speaker at the 1994 and 1995 International Conferences on Work Teams, the international Telework Event held at Nijenrode University, the Netherlands, the HR Technology Conference and Exposition in 1999 and the IBM/PeopleSoft Pacific Executive Symposium held in Melbourne, Australia in July 2001. In addition to his many speaking engagements, Dr. Boyett is a frequent guest on business radio and TV talk shows in major markets throughout the country and has been a featured guest on the nationally syndicated Business Radio Network.
Before joining Tarkenton Conn & Company in 1981 as Director of Consulting, Dr. Boyett served as a principal advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education on performance management and quality improvement programs for civil rights enforcement. He participated in the Department of Education's initial efforts to implement W. Edwards Deming's quality improvement approach in federal agencies.
Dr. Boyett began his career as a member of the faculty of the University of Georgia where he conducted research on public management for the University's Institute of Government and served as a consultant to state and local government officials.
Dr. Boyett holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in Political Science with an emphasis in political leadership and statistics. He is a member of The Author’s Guild, The American Society of Journalist and Authors (ASJA), and The American Political Science Association.
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