Having lived in different parts of the U.S. and in Mexico while he was growing up, Jeff received his Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree in Finance and management from Baylor University in Waco, TX. He then went on to graduate from Willamette University in Salem Oregon, with a Master of Management degree.
While in graduate school, Jeff interned with General Motors where he was a line supervisor in a union manufacturing facility. After graduating, he began his career in Atlanta, GA with Hayes Microcomputers, learning how to be a production planner and warehouse supervisor. He expected his career to be focused in manufacturing, but had the opportunity to join Intel Corporation in Portland, OR. He stepped into Accounts Payable, where he transformed the process by applying manufacturing practices. He led the 125-person organization through significant change and transformation. As the AP Controller, he built a culture of quality and execution through establishing a compelling vision, clear goals and celebrating successes. Those successes yielded over $10M in savings through discount management and maximizing payment float, as well as a 50% cost per transaction reduction.
Jeff excelled and was the youngest Finance Controller at the time. He was asked to create a global strategy to take Accounts Payable to a new level of performance, but not just in the US. He was asked to drive his culture and innovation around the world. To accomplish the objective, Jeff was allowed to hand pick his first global team to build the strategy. When the strategy was bought off, he was asked to lead the project team to build the new automated processes. At which time, Jeff moved into IT and was given a 50-person software development team to build the new automated AP process from the ground up. This was Jeff’s first step into project management, software design, development, and implementation. After two years, the software was build and deployed around the world. The project resulted in a $20M ROI and radically transformed the way Accounts Payable was run.
Once the project was completed, Jeff was recruited by a former manager to join him in Human Resources. So, he took the opportunity to lead a global project organization. He was given a software development team and a project team to deploy global systems for HR. This gave him a hands-on way to learn HR from the ground up. Jeff’s team designed and built a relocation management tool, deployed a global travel and expense tool, as well as a global content management system delivering over $3M in savings.
Jeff was then asked to take on an overseas assignment as the HR Operations Director based in Malaysia. He led a 200-person team across 13 countries (Malaysia, Thailand, India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. He was sent there to bring the corporate culture to that part of the world and improve delivery quality. He accomplished his goal through a variety of actions, including establishing a recognition system, communications system, feedback process, and a clear vision for a better organization. He then was able to consolidated the region and build a high functioning global shared service center and saved over $5M through economies of scale.
Once the Global HR Shared Service Center was in sustaining mode, Jeff was asked to move to Japan to help with employee engagement and leadership development of the $4B business. He transformed the culture, and was highlighted in the Nikkei Business magazine because of the innovative actions to make it a top 20 best company to work for in Japan. Leadership capability was also improved and revenues grew over 20% during his tenure. Key items were Establishing a new organization vision, delegating authority to lower levels in the organization, creating an innovation program to spark new ideas across the organization and establishing a quarterly budget with culture champions to spend it on engagement and culture strengthening activities.
From there, Jeff was recruited by Kimberly Clark and stepped into the role of HR Director responsible for global talent management and as the trusted partner to the US based VP’s and the International Group President. His key accomplishment was building a top talent identification initiative and detailed plans on developing leaders across the globe. He also built a comprehensive succession plan for the most critical role across the globe. Combined with a proactive leadership development process, two identified top talent are now Presidents and many more are in more senior roles.
Jeff was then asked to move to Moscow, Russia to take on the role of HR Director for Central & Eastern Europe. The key focus area for him was to transform talent acquisition, integrate a new acquisition and work on a divestiture. Jeff also needed to bring the KC culture to the region. He focused on leadership development and a significant organization restructure that reduced SG&A by 3%. Jeff also saved $3M with a redesigned and streamlined recruiting process. This enabled the organization to bring in higher quality talent that better fit the culture. He also led a compensation restructure to the regional manufacturing facility. While in Russia, Jeff was a finalist for the HR Professional of the year for HR Brand. After Jeff found his replacement, he was brought back to Atlanta, Ga and took on the role of Chief Learning Officer and spent the year focused on transforming the learning process for Kimberly Clark employees. Primarily, he introduced burst or micro-learning, as well as social mentoring and employee blogging. He also rolled out programs like coaching for all managers and accountability training. He also rolled out a new Learning Management System (LMS) in 15 languages across 54 countries in only 6 months.
Jeff was then recruited by his former manager to take on the role of Vice President of Human Resources and Global Talent responsible for talent acquisition, Learning & Development, Talent Management and employee communications. In this role, he drove a new culture and reinforced it across the 27,000 employees. Through three key activities, the culture was dramatically transformed. He established a recognition system, a story telling system and a feedback system which tied to the new corporate values. He also focused on building an employer brand and building out the employee communication capability. This included new intranet site, career site and a new way to get the CEO’s message consistently to employees. He also built and implemented a transformative performance development system that resulted in 98% of employees receiving annual performance feedback from the previous 45% high.
Since that time, Jeff has been providing HR consulting to small and medium sized companies, as well as to non-profit organizations. Most recently, Jeff has consulted with Big Brother/Big Sister of Dallas to provide an updated compensation structure, as well as built a new performance management process and identified top talent within the organization