Robert A. F. Reisner
Panel Chair

Robert A. F. Reisner has devoted a career to public policy transformation and its implications for economic and institutional change. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1971, went to Washington to work to help create the Environmental Protection Agency and has lived in Washington, D. C. ever since.

He has served in the government and has been a management consultant working for clients in the public and private sector on topics ranging from energy and environmental policy to communications policy to the impact of the Internet.

In the early 1990s Bob was closing the first phase of creating a telephone venture with the privatized Russian Space Command when he received a call from a headhunter recruiting him to become Vice President for Technology Applications at the US Postal Service. His mission was to create new electronic businesses as the Internet Tsunami first broke over a postal service that many called the dinosaur of the Information Age. Bob became the chief strategy officer of the USPS and served until 2001 when he returned to the private sector and management consulting. He wrote “When a Turnaround Stalls”, Harvard Business Review, 2002 about the experience.

Today Bob heads a boutique consulting firm in Washington (Transformation Strategy) where he works for clients in the US and abroad and he continues to write and speak about institutional transformation and managing innovation.