Authors and Consultants

Jon Gornstein, Founder and President of Persona GLOBAL®, Inc., is an industry pioneer in the practice of change leadership, organizational alignment, and interpersonal communication. Throughout the 33 years of his career, Mr. Gornstein has worked in more than 45 countries, providing consulting services to major multinational corporations facing competitive pressures and 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, when people in a corporation communicate more effectively, the corporation will have a better chance of achieving superior results. Since founding Persona GLOBAL®, 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 37 languages across 70+ countries. Companies that have benefited from Persona GLOBAL®, Inc.’s strategic partnerships worldwide include but are not limited to: BMW, Mazda, Kikkoman, Hitachi, Kawasaki, Dell, Alcatel, Motorola, Inter-Continental Hotels, Westin Hotels, British Airways, and Japan Airlines.

Focus

Based on his experience abroad, Mr. Gornstein concluded that businesses, regardless of country or culture, tended to face challenges in communication. Mr. Gornstein was “thinking global” before it became a common business catch phrase. With this insight, he and Dr. Donald Shepherd, former Education Director of Persona GLOBAL®, Inc., developed the Persona GLOBAL®’s social styles model. The Social Styles Model is the basis for the Persuasive Communicator Series feedback 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. Persuasive Communicator has been translated into 37 languages. More than a million people, in 1,300 major multinational corporations, have benefited from programs based on Persona GLOBAL®’s Social Styles Model. Mr. Gornstein also developed Persona GLOBAL®’s Innovative 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, business partners and governmental leaders to further develop Persona GLOBAL®’s business. He also meets frequently with more than 1,350 licensed and certified Persona GLOBAL® 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. In 2012, Persona GLOBAL® launched PC GamePlan, a mobile application sophisticated enough to take into account the variables that occur in interpersonal relationships. The goal is to enable users to adapt their behavior to those whom they are trying to influence — to make the user a “fluent” communicator based on the listener’s social style. Among the many countries, outside the United States, that Mr. Gornstein conducted workshops in 2012: Dubai, Egypt, India and Russia.

Experience

Mr. Gornstein has consulted on performance and communication improvement to companies such as IBM, Glaxo, Cathay Pacific Airways, Goldstar, Hilton Hotels, and Abbott, Insurance Company Moscow PLC, Syberia Medical Insurance Organization PLC and Supernet, Pakistan’s leading corporate data network. 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 government 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 GLOBAL® into an international 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

Mr. Gornstein is a Ph. D. candidate 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).