Howard Guttman

Howard Guttman Speaker Biography

Howard M. Guttman is principal of Guttman Development Strategies, Inc. (GDS), a Mount Arlington, New Jersey-based management consulting firm founded in 1989 and specializing in building horizontal, high-performance teams; strategic and organizational alignment; leadership coaching; and leadership development. GDS has been ranked as a top Leadership Development consulting firm by Leadership Excellence magazine, which also named Howard to its list of "Excellence 100 Top Thought Leaders".

GDS focuses on aligning senior management teams, developing the strategy and implementation of "horizontal" organizations (brand teams, matrix structures, global teams), and executive development. Mr. Guttman and his team of consultants are known for creating programs and processes that are pragmatic, result-oriented, and produce observable change. His style is direct, and he enables clients to clearly see the distinction between symptoms and core organization issues.

GDS has worked with a wide range of organizations in a variety of industries throughout the U.S. and globally. GDS has provided consulting to privately held and publicly traded companies such as Carnival Corporation, Colgate-Palmolive, GlaxoSmithKline, Keurig Dr Pepper, L’Oreal, Mars, Inc., and Walmart. Non-profit clients have included the YMCA, City Harvest, Women In Need, and the Chicago Navy Pier. Universities they have worked with include Rutgers, Harvard, Columbia, and NYU. Private Equity clients have included Blackstone, Carlyle, Advent, and JAB.

Mr. Guttman’s corporate experience includes Johnson & Johnson and Automatic Data Processing. He holds an MSW from Case Western Reserve University's School of Applied Social Sciences.

Mr. Guttman is the author of Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance (John Wiley; www.greatbusinessteams.com), named one of the Top Business Books of 2009 by Soundview Executive Book Summaries. He is also the author of When Goliaths Clash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization. His third book, Coach Yourself to Win: 7 Steps to Breakthrough Performance on the Job and in Your Life, was published by McGraw-Hill (www.coachyourselftowin.com) and named to the Washington Post's list of Top 5 Business Books for April 2011.

Articles by Mr. Guttman have appeared and he has been quoted in broad-interest newspapers and magazines such as TIME magazine, American Airlines’ American Way, Amtrak’s Arrive, Business News New Jersey, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Newark Star Ledger, U.S. News and World Report, and U.S.A. Today magazine and the Harvard Management Update.

Mr. Guttman frequently addresses academic and corporate audiences on such topics as “Great Business Teams: What Does It Take?”; “Conflict Management as a Core Leadership Competency,” “Putting Performance into High-Performance Teams,” “Executive Coaching: Lessons from the Firing Line,” “Alignment: Creating High Performance Teams from the Top Down,” and “Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Through Self-Coaching.”