Dave Robson is a management consultant specializing in technical organizations. He worked in the Xerox corporate research organization for 33 years as a researcher, research manager, Quality Officer, and Vice President of Human Resources. After retiring from Xerox, Dave established an independent consulting practice, Robson & Robson. In his work at Xerox as a line manager and as an internal consultant, Dave developed a knack for building bridges between different organizational cultures. He was particularly successful at bridging the gap between the organizational culture of research and the organizational culture of other parts of the business - a key enabler for successful innovation. Dave has extensive experience implementing corporate programs in technical organizations, relying on his strong communication, interpersonal, team-building, and technical skills.

Specific areas of expertise

After a scientific/technical education at UC Irvine, Dave began his career at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as a member of the research group that pioneered object-oriented programming and created the first Graphical User Interface. Although he still finds innovative technology fascinating, he gravitated in his career toward management and organizational issues. After managing two research labs at PARC, he became the Quality Officer for the Xerox Corporate Research Group during a time when Total Quality Management was the umbrella for most organizational transformation efforts at Xerox. For the last 8 years of his Xerox career, he was responsible for all Human Resources in the global research and advanced technology organization. In the roles of Quality Officer and Vice President of Human Resources, he led and facilitated a wide variety of organizational transformations. Many of the problems encountered while implementing these initiatives resulted from differences between the cultures of different organizations. Dave developed considerable expertise in bridging different organizational cultures to achieve effective organizational transformation and enable innovation. That expertise is the foundation of his consulting practice.

Selected projects:

• Technology Managers Learn the Language of Business: Technical managers were frustrated in their efforts to influence business decisions about how to capitalize on research and technology results. The Senior Vice President of Research and Technology observed that technical managers tended not to speak in the same terms as business people, the terms of business models. He asked Dave to design and implement a series of workshops in collaboration with the Harvard Business School to address that issue. The Business Models Workshops, five three-day off-site events, gave a group of 40 senior research and technology managers an in-depth learning experience in business strategy, finance, and operations. Many of the participants credited these workshops with significantly improving their ability to influence commercialization decisions about innovative technologies they developed.
  
  
• Quality Program Tailored for Research: Leadership Through Quality was a highly successful implementation of Total Quality Management, resulting in several Baldridge awards for Xerox. However, its deployment in the research community was problematic at best. The reactions of the researchers and research managers ranged from benign neglect to active antagonism. Dave was asked to become the Quality Officer for the Corporate Research Group and address these problems. Securing the buy-in of skeptical researchers and research managers required rethinking and reimplementing the program, processes, and training from the perspective of the research culture. Based on an extensive analysis of the root causes of the problems, Dave developed a framework for Total Quality Management appropriate for a research organization. In addition to improving the acceptance of Leadership Through Quality in the Xerox research organization, Dave also worked with several Xerox customers facing similar issues with TQM programs in their own research organizations.
  
• Organizational Design for Innovation: Over the course of 15 years, Xerox implemented three major corporate reorganizations in response to the changing needs of the business. Each of these reorganizations required rethinking the structure, mission, roles, and relationships of the research and technology organizations. Dave participated in the three task forces that designed and implemented new organization structures for corporate research and technology consistent with the overall corporate reorganizations.
  
• Policy Deployment / Strategic Planning Tailored for Research: Policy Deployment was a centerpiece of Leadership Through Quality, so the research organization needed to participate. However, the corporate framework for Policy Deployment was designed for a business organization with clear, observable, short-term financial metrics. Dave led the design and implementation of a Policy Deployment framework that was integrated with the corporate framework, but was better suited to the longer-term and less strictly financial metrics of a research organization. It became the foundation for strategic planning in the research and advanced technology organization.
  
• Strategic Hiring under Adverse Circumstances: As a result of a sustained period of spending reductions and hiring freezes, the research and advanced technology organization didn’t hire any new scientists and engineers for several years in a row. This led to the risk of losing contact with the latest technical competencies and research trends. The CEO instructed Dave, as the VP of HR for research, to start hiring new scientists again even though she was unable to give any incremental budget to fund the new hires. Despite the direction of the CEO, the research managers who would have to do the actual hiring were reluctant to proceed. They had been laying off people in their organizations because of reducing budgets and they worried that bringing on additional people would increase the pressure for more lay-offs if budget pressures persisted. Dave led a strategic hiring initiative to address the concerns of the hiring managers and respond to the CEO’s direction. He led a group of senior managers in creating a new framework for recruiting. A key enabler was a new agreement about dealing with budget issues as a team. In the first year, an extremely well qualified group of future technical leaders was brought into the company. In subsequent years, the impact of these new hires began to be felt and hiring continued despite continued tight budgets.
  
• Compensation Planning Processes Tailored for Research: Many large companies are taking a shared services approach to the basic HR functions, including compensation planning. While this has clear benefits, a standardized process may not fit the organizational and management culture of some parts of the company. Dave designed and implemented salary planning and management bonus programs that addressed the specific needs of a research organization and yet fit into the standard corporate compensation programs. The research managers were appreciative and the compensation shared service expressed interest in using some of the ideas in the standard process.

Education:

University of California at Irvine
Bachelor of Arts, Physics, Magna cum Laude
Bachelor of Science, Information and Computer Science, Cum Laude