Dave Ulrich

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Dave Ulrich (David Olson Ulrich) was born in 1953 in Ely, Nevada. He is a university professor, author, speaker, and management consultant who teaches at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and co-founded The RBL Group. He has written more than 30 books with colleagues that have shaped how companies manage people, leadership, and value for customers and investors.

Ulrich grew up in Oregon. His father was a forester and his mother did community service. He earned a BA from Brigham Young University and a PhD in Organization Theory from UCLA. He has honorary doctorates from Abertay University in Scotland and Utah Valley University (2020).

His work focuses on how organizations add value through talent, leadership, organization, and human resources. He helped redefine HR into shared services, centers of expertise, and business partners, and led large studies on HR competencies. He also emphasizes aligning HR with customer needs and organizational capabilities.

With Norm Smallwood, Ulrich co-founded The RBL Group in 1999. They study leadership outcomes, create a leadership brand inside companies, and show how investing in leadership can raise shareholder value. They have a unified view of leadership competencies and consider leadership from an investor’s perspective, including the leadership capital index used by investors and boards.

In the organization area, Ulrich defines organizations as capabilities and writes about culture change, learning, collaboration, change management, and organization design. His 2019 book Reinventing the Organization, co-authored with Arthur Yeung, describes organizations as market-oriented ecosystems.

Ulrich has served on boards, including 17 years with Herman Miller, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He was a trustee of Southern Virginia University for nine years and spoke in Asia in 2014 as part of the Asian Institute of Finance Distinguished Speaker Series.

His work has earned him major recognitions: BusinessWeek named him the #1 Management Educator, Fast Company listed him as one of the 10 most innovative leaders, he is in the Thinker's Fifty Hall of Fame, and HR magazine named him the most influential thinker in HR of the decade.