RICHARD H. AXELROD, MBA
DICK AXELROD co-founded with his wife, Emily, the Axelrod Group, Inc., a consulting firm that pioneered the use of employee involvement to effect large‑scale organizational change.
Raised in Chicago, he received his bachelor's degree in industrial management from Purdue University, and his master's degree in business administration from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army in Korea.
Before forming the Axelrod Group, Dick was an organization development manager for General Foods, which was among the first companies in America to use self-directed work teams (a strategy whose philosophy made a great impact on Dick). He now brings more than thirty-five years of consulting and teaching experience to this work, with clients including Boeing, Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Novartis, and the UK’s National Health Service.
Dick is faculty in Columbia University’s Professional Program in Organization Development, the University of Chicago’s Leadership Arts Program, and a guest lecturer at Benedictine University. He served on the board of Berrett-Koehler Publishers and helped to found the Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative. Dick co-chaired the Illinois Quality of Work Life Association and currently serves on the advisory board for the Organization Design Forum.
Dick’s interactive speaking style provides participants will practical tools that they can use the very next hour.
Dick authored the award-winning Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations, and co-authored You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done, which the New York Times called “the best of the current crop of books on this subject.”
He lives in Chicago with his wife, Emily, and is a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan. They have two children and two grandchildren.
Dick is the recipient of the Organization Development Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award.