Brian Yost

Brian Yost has over 25 years’ experience in cutting-edge organization innovation and performance improvement work. He has held corporate Director and VP roles, and now serves as an external consultant. His track record includes transformational turnarounds of six Fortune 500 businesses, and he has been recognized as being in the world’s top handful of Organization Development consultants. His focus is on enabling organizations to apply the principles and practices research has found to distinguish the great and lasting, most responsible companies, and to evolve beyond them.

His experience as an internal was in the following progressive organizations:

    •  Xerox and Transamerica

• Crown Zellerbach (now GP)           

• Atlantic Richfield (now BP)

• Crocker Bank (now Wells)  

He is one of a handful of consultants with successful track records in corporate-wide transformation work.  For example, as Corporate Director, Organization Effectiveness at Crown Zellerbach Corporation, a Fortune 100 company, Brian initiated, managed and acted as change agent in one of the most successful corporate change efforts yet undertaken. Some achievements, which enabled Crown to move from the bottom of its industry to near the top in less than two years, were:

• many major plant turnarounds (some of which were originally seen as "impossible") 

• breakthrough strategic planning and repositioning in key businesses 

• unprecedented union-management partnerships 

• creation of a unified, empowering corporate culture out of a number of diverse subcultures.

As an external consultant, Brian has enabled organizations to make, as at Crown Zellerbach, rapid and dramatic improvements in organizing, operating and business effectiveness.  This includes turnarounds in five major corporations, many projects with returns of 1000-2000-to-1, savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and "impossible" breakthroughs on over 20 initiatives. His clients include:

• Hewlett-Packard, Shell, AT&T

• Siemens, Gulf, Mobil, BofA 

• NUMMI (Toyota), Exxon 

• Digital, Quantum, CVS        

Brian participated in founding the International Center for Organization Design, whose mission has been to search out, integrate and evolve the best organization performance improvement methods available. Brian's work with ICOD has uniquely positioned him to be a change architect and strategist.

Some representative engagements include the following:

•  a collaborative ICOD effort (by previously competing providers) at Exxon Canada (its refineries went from 4th to     1st Quartile worldwide)

•  a global transformation of DEC’s Service Sector, moving it from being a drain on the company, to making 80% of its  profits with 30% of its employees

•  a successful, pioneering "breakthrough merger" of two major corporations (2/3 of mergers fail)

•  increasing a Gulf SBU’s profitability from $50 to $100 million using breakthrough technology

•  a successful startup of Shell’s flagship gas plant, a model high performance learning organization

•  a transformational closure of an HP circuit board plant (virtually everyone placed, productivity up 2x, $10 million saved,    new paradigm spreading in co.)

•  reducing the cost of an Exxon capital investment project from $32 to $12 million in one event    

•  creating the Thinking Organization Series, a comprehensive capability development process providing the teaming, leadership and consulting skills  essential for high performance

•  successful change leadership support for ERP, strategy, business process and reengineering initiatives.

Core Competencies include: organization assessment, organization redesign/transformation, innovation, breakthrough performance improvement, change leadership, team, leadership & consultant development, culture change, group facilitation, strategic planning, executive coaching 

Brian holds BA and MBA degrees from the University of Washington, UCLA and the Harvard Business School. He has taught in the USC and UCLA business schools and in top online MBA programs.