William J. Rothwell

William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., DBA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, RODC, FLMI, CPTD Fellow, is President of Rothwell & Associates, Inc., Rothwell & Associates, LLC, and Rothwell & Associates Korea. As a consultant he has worked with over fifty multinational companies and countless governments and nonprofits. In addition to the three consulting companies he founded, he also founded three small businesses (a vacation rental home company employing three people; a personal care home for the elderly licensed for fifty beds employing twenty-seven people; and an eighteen-unit motel employing nine people). Before joining Penn State in 1993, he had over fifteen years of executive-level work experience in human resources, talent development, and Organization Development leadership in government (the Illinois Office of the Auditor General) and in business (Franklin Life Insurance Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of a multinational company, #forty-eight on the Fortune 500 list). As a Distinguished Professor at Penn State University, University Park, where he has taught for 30 years, he is co-Professor-in-Charge of an online and onsite academic program that offers a master’s degree in Organization Development (the MPS in ODC) and a Ph.D. program in Workforce Education and Development with an emphasis in Talent Development/Organization Development. With a combined total of fifty years of work experience in HR, OD, and Talent Development, he has published 159 books in the Human Resources field. He earned a special award in 1998 from the American Society for Training and Development for his leadership on ASTD Models for Human Performance Improvement; in 2004 he was awarded the Best Book Award from the Academy of HRD for The Strategic Development of Talent; in 2004 he earned Penn State University’s Graduate Faculty Teaching Award (only one per year is given on Penn State’s twenty-four campuses); in 2011 he earned the Association for Talent Development’s (ATD) Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award and also the UNICEF and Kiwanis International’s Walter Zeller Medal (Award) for International Service; in 2016 he earned the Distinguished Researcher Award by the College of Education at Penn State; in 2022 he earned the Organization Development Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award and also Penn State University’s highest award for international work; and in 2023 he was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame (hosted globally by the University of Oklahoma). He has conducted training on training, Organization Development, Talent Development, coaching, and much more on every continent except Antarctica and has taught in universities globally—including eighty-three trips to China and thirty-two trips to Singapore. His recent books since 2020 include Mastering the Art of Process Consultation and Virtual Group Coaching Simulation (2023); Successful Supervisory Leadership (2023); Transformational Coaching (2023); Succession Planning for Small and Family Businesses (2022); High-Performance Coaching for Managers (2022); Rethinking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (2022); Organization Development (OD) Interventions: Executing Effective Organizational Change (2021); Virtual Coaching to Improve Group Relationships (2021); The Essential HR Guide for Small Business and Start Ups (2020); Increasing Learning and Development’s Impact Through Accreditation (2020); Adult Learning Basics, 2nd ed. (2020); and, Workforce Development: Guidelines for Community College Professionals, 2nd ed. (2020).