Profile

Jon Gornstein, Founder and President of Persona Global, is an industry pioneer in the practice of change leadership, organizational alignment, and interpersonal communication. During his 25-year career, Mr. Gornstein has worked in more than 40 countries, providing consulting services to major multi-national corporations facing competitive pressures necessitating strategic change.

Mr. Gornstein's career has integrated his two major interests: international business and human development. In 1980, he founded Persona Global, with the premise that, if people in a corporation communicated more effectively, the corporation would have a better chance of achieving superior results. Since founding Persona, Mr. Gornstein has partnered with the world's leading consultants in corporate performance and leadership to develop a full range of training methodologies and metrics in organizational alignment, change leadership, and performance management. Persona Global's training and consulting intervention programs are now available in up to 26 languages across 34 countries.

Companies that have benefited from this relationship with Persona and Persona's partners include BMW, Mazda, Kikkoman, Hitachi, Kawasaki, Dell Computer, Alcatel, Motorola, Inter-Continental Hotels, Westin Hotels, British Airways, and Japan Airlines.

Focus

Before "thinking global" became a common phrase in business, Mr. Gornstein saw, based on his experience abroad, that businesses, regardless of country or culture, tended to face communication issues. With this insight, he and Dr. Donald Shepherd, former Education Director of Persona, developed the Persona Social Styles Model. The Social Styles Model is the basis for the Persuasive Communicator Series feed-back metrics and workshop methodology developed by Mr. Gornstein. Persuasive Communicator skills help business people build trust, project empathy, and be appropriately flexible with others - the dynamics of effective communication.

More than a million people, in 1,300 major MNC corporations, have benefited from programs based on Persona's Social Styles Model.

Mr. Gornstein also developed Persona's Creative Decision Making program, an individualized, self-assessment, and workshop-based methodology which examines how the creative process can be applied to optimize decision making and problem solving. The methodology offers individuals insights into their decision-making style, and a set of practical tools for improving overall creativity in decision making.

Current Activities

Mr. Gornstein travels continually, meeting with CEOs, and business and governmental leaders to further develop Persona's business.

He also meets frequently with more than 600 licensed and certified Persona trainers and consultants around the world.

"In a high-tech age where impersonal e-mails have replaced phone calls, I firmly believe that face-to-face meetings are even more important. You learn so much more when you can see a person's reactions and ask questions. The 'high touch' approach enables us to be immediately responsive to our partners' needs. Responsiveness is one of our core values that help us fulfill our brand promise," says Mr. Gornstein.

Mr. Gornstein is a frequent keynote speaker at major corporate and industry events.

Experience

Mr. Gornstein has consulted on performance and communication improvement to companies such as IBM, Glaxo, Cathay Pacific Airways, Goldstar, and Hilton Hotels. His engagements have included initiatives in customer relationship management, multi-year strategic interventions to implement corporate cultural change, executive coaching, team building, and managerial performance survey.

In the 1970s, Mr. Gornstein served as a training consultant to the Danish Foreign Ministry. There he developed cross-cultural training modules for Danish professionals sent by the Danish governmnent on overseas missions to over 30 foreign countries. Later, he was appointed director of European operations for a U.S.-based training firm. Based in Copenhagen, he managed more than 60 consultants from 12 European countries.

Part of his primary duties was developing technology transfer programs.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Gornstein focused on developing Persona into a global success. In the late 1990s, he joined Deloitte Consulting, where he served as lead partner for Educational Services for Deloitte's Western Region for some time. At Deloitte, he led a number of global initiatives, including those in customer relationship management (CRM), with a focus on industry leaders such as Siebel and BroadVision.

Education and Honors

Mr. Gornstein is a Cand. Phil at Aarhus University, Denmark. Awarded a John Marshall fellowship from the Scandinavian American Foundation, he conducted his doctoral research in history, and later continued his studies with a research grant from the Danish Humanistic Research Council. He holds a B. A. and an M. A. from the University of Alabama, where he studied American and European history, psychology, and economics. Mr. Gornstein is a member of the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD).