Before joining Special Olympics, Pasternack spent more than 28 years as a Senior Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., and was Managing Partner of its San Francisco Office. He was the founding partner and leader of Booz Allen's firm-wide organization and strategic leadership practice, which is concerned with top management organization, business model transformation and leadership issues. Previously, he led Booz Allen?s energy, chemicals and pharmaceuticals practice, was a member of Booz Allen's Board of Directors and chaired its personnel committee.

Along with a colleague, he wrote a book called The Centerless Corporation, published by Simon & Schuster in February 1998, and has published many other articles, including "Yellow Light Leadership" in The Wall Street Journal, and "The Four Bases of Organizational DNA" in strategy+business. He led a worldwide study with the World Economic Forum on how companies build the organizational capacity for leadership and renewal, which was reported on in Davos, Switzerland. His new book, Results: Keep What's Good, Fix What's Wrong and Unlock Great Performance, co-authored with Gary Neilson, Booz Allen Senior Vice President, will be published in October 2005 by Crown Business, a division of Random House.

Prior to joining Booz Allen, Pasternack was Associate Administrator for Policy and Program Evaluation at the Federal Energy Administration (predecessor of the Department of Energy), responsible for all energy policy development and coordination in the Executive Branch. He served as principal staff to the President's Energy Resources Council and participated in the Camp David Energy Summit.

Before coming to the FEA, he served as a staff member at the President's Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. His industrial experience includes more than four years at the General Electric Company's Space Division, where he was an aerospace systems engineer, and at Exxon Research and Engineering.

Bruce Pasternack is a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Board of Special Olympics; the Board of Trustees at The Cooper Union; the Board of the Bay Area Council; and the Western Region Advisory Board of Catalyst. He served on the Advisory Council of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business; the Advisory Board of the North American Nutrition and Agribusiness Fund; the corporate Advisory Board of USC's Center for Effective Organizations (CEO); and the Board of Lifespring Home Nutrition. He was a member of the Governors for Energy of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and is on the San Francisco Mayor's Municipal Fiscal Advisory Committee.  

Pasternack has engineering and operations research degrees from The Cooper Union and the University of Pennsylvania.

His presentation topics include:

Organizational DNA is a new concept which describes the four building blocks of organizational success: decision rights, structure, information, and motivators. Based upon extensive research with business all over the world, and over 11,000 profiles that have been completed by individual members of these organizations, there are lessons learned about what to do when your organization has an unhealthy DNA. We have found that about two-thirds of organizations are unhealthy, exhibiting the characteristics of either a passive aggressive organization, an overmanaged one, a fits-and-starts model, or outgrown one. Our data shows that in most organizations there is a root cause of the failure to execute and to achieve the company's aspirations. The findings from this research were highlighted in a major story in USA Today (April 12, 2004), CNBC, and other media.

Achieving Business Resilience

What is your role as a leader to ensure that your organization is resilient and doesn't face the problems of companies like Enron, Worldcom, Disney, Shell, etc? In today's business climate, it is essential that you understand your vulnerabilities, whether from poor governance, illegal activities, information security breaches, terrorism, product failures, disruptions of your supply chain, etc. How do you know what to invest to protect your most valuable assets? Extensive research backs up this talk.
CEO turnover is at an all-time high. Why are executives losing their jobs and what can you do to avoid being the next one to resign to pursue other interests? We have completed the most extensive worldwide studies of CEO turnover during the last several years, which have been reported on in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other media. What lessons can be learned?

The Centerless Corporation is a new model, built for growth, which deals more effectively with today's fast-paced complex global business environment. It replaces the traditional model with a big, central headquarters operating in command and control manner, barking out orders with information flowing in and out. The Centerless Corporation should be thought of as a network with a core- connected without boundaries and with alliances (internal and external). The Centerless Corporation has leaders throughout the company who focus on what is really important: people, values, strategy, customers, governance and learning. The Centerless Corporation is the result of one of the most extensive studies ever done on corporate behavior. It incorporates individual company case studies, interviews with hundreds of the world's foremost business leaders, academic studies, and empirical research by Booz-Allen & Hamilton, one of the world?s leading management consulting firms.