Russ Scalpone provides consulting and research in organization effectiveness and change management, with special emphasis on strategic scorecarding, staff service effectiveness, survey assessment and evaluation, and team building to support performance improvement and innovation. His work in strategic performance measurement has been the subject of presentations before the International Quality & Productivity Center and the Conference Board, as well as an article authored for Employment Relations Today.
Russ received his Ph.D. in Psychology, focusing his doctoral research upon the factors affecting attitude change. Following his graduate training, Russ joined A.T. Kearney, Inc., where he spent almost 12 years as a consultant and Manager providing client services in such areas as organization redesign, operations improvement, management development, and training systems design. At both Kearney, and later as a Consulting Psychologist with the firm of Medina & Thompson, Inc., Russ also utilized psychological assessment and coaching to improve executive performance, and helped client organizations to improve organizational performance by implementing high performance work systems.
In 1993, Russ joined one of his clients, Amoco Corporation, to become a Practice Leader, providing organization effectiveness consulting to Amoco businesses and Shared Service departments. This work encompassed change management consulting and developing a wide range of tools and processes, such as employee and customer surveys, diversity assessment tools and measures, and a business assessment based upon the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. Russ also headed a team that designed Amoco’s approach to Strategic Scorecarding, a process that was benchmarked and recognized internationally as a best practice.
When Amoco was acquired by BP, Russ left to join McDonald’s Corporation, where he became a Practice Leader and Director, Organization Effectiveness & Assessment. At McDonald’s, Russ led a three-person unit that provided consulting on organization effectiveness and measurement within the US and often internationally. His team oversaw administration and reporting of employee surveys within the US System, along with research relative to unit effectiveness. This included designing and managing a multi-year Linkage Research Project that determined the impact of management practices upon business outcomes. The study, encompassing 13,000 restaurants and 47,000 customers, was the largest ever conducted at McDonald’s, revealing the “drivers” of both McDonald's customer experience and employment experience, as well as the relationship of these factors to customer count trends and financial results. Russ leveraged the findings of this study in disseminating best practices throughout McDonald’s and by managing a project that created a strategic scorecard for the global HR function.
Upon leaving McDonald’s, Russ founded and currently leads the Employee-Customer Measurement Network, a group of 90 commercial, educational, and public sector organizations. This network is aimed at transferring best practices and educating members in using employee and customer feedback, survey tools, and performance measures to improve organizational results. In the last two years, he has authored or co-authored six white papers covering a range of topics and currently teaches Creativity and Innovation within the Masters program at Northwestern University. His consulting work with new product teams also led him to develop the Innovation Capability Assessment (ICA), a survey tool that permits clients to assess and improve organizational success factors critical to product/process innovation and new product development.
Russ participates in a variety of professional organizations, holding memberships in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, American Society for Quality, and the American Psychological Association’s Division 5 – Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics.
