Evolution of Dan Ciampa’s Brand of Advice & Counsel

Dan Ciampa is an advisor to CEOs and boards of directors whose organizations face the challenges of significant strategic, operational, and cultural change.

Because the stakes are so high during such times, advice and counsel must meet the highest professional standards. That means it must be carefully thought through, tailored to each situation, and achieve results as soon as possible but that are sustainable; also, it should leave behind capabilities that enable leaders and senior managers to carry on without outside help. Required are commitment to perfecting the art of giving advice plus broad skills and deep experience in strategy execution, operations improvement, utilizing new technology, adapting culture, and leadership under pressure. Dan has spent his long career immersed in and contributing to each area.

While an undergraduate, he co-founded and led Boston College’s Group Dynamics Center (a program that still exists) and was trained by NTL Institute in teambuilding and conflict resolution. In addition to facilitating training programs in these areas, he put their principles into practice as executive director of a city-wide social services agency, community organizer, and director of a university-industry consortium to provide inner-city jobs.

Upon graduation he became a senior consultant at Sterling Institute’s Behavioral Science Center (later McBer & Company), a seminal organization culture and leadership development firm that during Dan’s time there conducted the first formal organization climate diagnoses, invented competency assessment, and pioneered approaches that became standard practice for leadership, teamwork, and small group decision making. Much of its work translated research from Harvard (Department of Social Relations and the Harvard Business School) and MIT (Sloan School) into practical applications in industrial companies and government economic development programs.

He then joined Rath & Strong, Inc (one of the original and most highly regarded manufacturing engineering services firms) that for decades had pioneered innovations in industrial engineering, statistical process control and quality assurance, production and inventory control, and manufacturing software. The firm had decided that existing approaches to operations efficiency and effectiveness, some of which it had invented years before, were no longer sufficient in an era of globalization and dramatic technological advances. Its new strategy would merge its technical problem-solving expertise with areas that were novel to the firm - leadership, employee involvement, organization development, and culture change. The measure of success would be both quantitative and qualitative improvements that were better and longer lasting than either approach could achieve on its own.

Dan’s mission was to lead the creation of that new way of providing help, which required a radical change of the firm’s culture. After a few years of testing and learning, he led the creation of the first successful multi-disciplinary approach in the consulting profession. It was applied to operations effectiveness, systems automation, and continuous improvement and produced one of the first Total Quality (TQ) programs and the first Just-in-Time (JIT) service (the combination became the precursor to today’s Lean Enterprise operating model). As a result, the firm became one of the prominent leaders in the renaissance of western manufacturing.

During this time, Dan was immersed in two areas that held great promise. One was the set of innovative design, manufacturing, and distribution approaches being applied by Japanese industry that led to America’s TQ/JIT efforts (helped by two long-time friends of the firm who had educated the leading Japanese companies – Edwards Deming and Joe Juran). The second area was executing strategy at a time of uncertainty and rapid technology change (in this case, coached by Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group). He participated in the early days of manufacturing automation and open-source software development, directed the firm’s practices in manufacturing strategy, industrial engineering, quality and reliability, organization culture, and leadership, became an Associate of the British Institute of Management, represented the firm with the Japanese Management Association, and was an adjudicating judge of the American Arbitration Association.

Twelve years after joining, Dan was appointed CEO and chairman, positions he held for the next ten years; at which point he hired his successor, transferred authority to him over the next year, and left the firm in his hands. In 2025, Rath & Strong celebrates its 90th anniversary.

Since the late 1990s, Dan has concentrated on the complexities of planned CEO successions during times of strategic, operational, and cultural change. He chose this area because organization-wide improvement is most complex and important when a new leader takes charge with a change mandate; also because he had experienced CEO succession from every perspective – the designated successor who became the leader with a change mandate, the CEO who turned his company over to his successor, the principal advisor in dozens of successions, and a board member of organizations going through leadership hand-offs.

Noticing the lack of research on CEO succession, he collaborated with Professor Michael Watkins of the Harvard Business School on the first formal research on planned, top-level successions and with Michael wrote the first book on this type of succession (Right From the Start, Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

From 2001-2002 he was Special Advisor to the Office of the Secretary of the US Treasury. Since then, Dan has counseled CEOs and boards facing conditions that, when they happen simultaneously, present the most complex of leadership problems – a new strategy must be implemented which requires the operating model to change to the point that the culture must adapt while a leadership transition takes place from incumbent to successor.

Dan has led his own organization through a period of existential change. He’s been a senior advisor to the leaders of every type of organization in virtually every industry. He has written five books (two on manufacturing strategy and operations improvement, and three on the challenges of the new leader and CEO succession) and dozens of articles on operations improvement, strategy implementation, and leadership (including 12 for the Harvard Business Review on various aspects of leadership succession). Dan has been a board member of five organizations, chairman of the Automation Forum, a founding member of Boston University’s Manufacturing Roundtable, and on the boards of visitors of Vanderbilt University’s Owens School of Management and Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He was named by Business Week as one of the top five CEO advisors and has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, National Public Radio, and Voice of America.