Partner Emeritus and the founder of Schaffer Consulting View All Team Members

Robert Schaffer

Partner Emeritus and the founder of Schaffer Consulting

For most of his career Schaffer has pioneered in developing and applying consulting approaches that are based on the idea of achieving performance improvement and capability development through frequent and rapid client success experiences. The journal, Consulting to Management, called his book, High-Impact Consulting (Jossey Bass, 2002) the “single most useful current book on the practice of management consulting.”

In the book, Rapid Results: How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change (Jossey-Bass, 2005), Schaffer and his colleagues describe how these innovative approaches have helped clients across the globe achieve astounding success.

In addition to Rapid Results!, Schaffer authored The Breakthrough Strategy (HarperBusiness, 1988). He has also published more than 70 articles on performance improvement, change acceleration, and consulting, including seven articles in the Harvard Business Review.

Schaffer was the first to write about:

  • the use of short-term successful achievement projects as major stepping stones to large-scale organization progress.
  • the importance of ensuring that strategic plans are implemented in order to achieve the desired results in Putting Action Into Planning.
  • the need for much more powerful and effective demand-making by senior managers Demand Better Results – and Get Them (an HBR classic) was one of the ten most requested Harvard Business Review reprints in the decade 1990 to 2000.

He was also the first to emphasize that actual on-the-job achievements of the right kind is the most powerful mode of developing leadership capability in “Management Development Through Management Achievement” in Personnel.

Earlier in his career Schaffer was Chairman of the Professional Development Committee of the Institute of Management Consultants, and he is currently invited to address numerous professional associations and government organizations.

Robert Schaffer has advanced management thinking in multiple areas, and has helped senior executives of many companies and government agencies throughout the world apply the concepts to their organizations with great returns.

Schaffer earned a BS in mechanical engineering at the Columbia School of Engineering and a Doctor of Education in counseling and management psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has been named a Distinguished Alumnus of Teachers College.