Steven Zeisler - Biographical Overview

Steven Zeisler is a recognized world-class expert in innovation, working and studying for three decades in the fields of leadership, entrepreneurship, strategic thinking, applied creativity and business innovation. He has run a start-up business within a Fortune 15 company and, in 1994, founded Zeisler Associates, Inc., helping organizations around the world innovate at increasingly higher success levels.

Zeisler's effectiveness is based on solid research, applied study and successful real-world business experience. He debunks many of the myths and misconceptions about creativity and innovation promulgated by fads and social mania. His efforts have helped clients around the world create breakthroughs in virtually all walks of corporate and organizational life – from the R & D lab to the factory floor – worth hundreds of millions of dollars for clients from Paris to Singapore and New York to Johannesburg, and on products and services as diverse as ice cream and automobiles to skin treatment and coffee, across industries ranging from defense to retail jewelry. A partial client list includes:

  • ALCOA
  • Astra-Zeneca
  • Bentley Systems
  • British Airways
  • Cargill
  • Citigroup
  • Cintas
  • Estée Lauder Companies
  • Exxon-Mobil
  • Federal Express
  • General Dynamics
  • Marriott Corporation
  • Medtronic
  • Nestlé
  • Valero Energy

He has served on the faculty of a variety of corporate and government learning institutions and forums including those of Nestlé, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, Xerox, and the Institute for Management Studies. He has lectured and conducted workshops at universities and institutions around the world including Penn State, Rutgers, Howard University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Washington, the Army Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia and the Eastern Management Development Center. For the past 16 years he has served as a guest lecturer on leadership, innovation and creative thinking at the US Army War College.

Zeisler is a member of the World Future Society and is the author of articles on Leadership, Innovation, Creativity, and Chaos Theory that have been published in periodicals and journals worldwide. In 2000 his interactive creative thinking software “SENSEI…Where Innovators Go to Think®” was released. The powerful innovation tool was used successfully in a large number of organizations around the world. In 2005, Zeisler co-authored the book “The Manager’s Handbook for Virtual Teams”, a practical and effective leader’s guide to working with and developing high performing virtual teams that rapidly became a “must-read”. An article he co-authored on the Climate for Innovation was published in the spring 2015 issue of the Drucker Foundation’s award-winning journal “Leader to Leader”.

He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and continued his studies in Education and Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Australia and the Occupational Research Centre in the UK. He served as a member of the International Association of University Presidents/United Nations Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace. He is a former Vice-Chair of the Board of the GRAMMY-nominated Delaware Symphony Orchestra, served on the Board of the Arts Consortium of Delaware, and is past President of the Board of Directors for Reading ASSIST Institute, a non-profit dedicated to the teaching of reading to children with dyslexia and other specific reading disabilities.

Zeisler recently was invited by Dr. Edward de Bono to participate in the World Council for New Thinking, a group of worldclass thinkers including six Nobel Prize winners, to work on key global issues. He is currently at work co-authoring a book on Leadership best practices distilled from the three-day Civil War Battle at Gettysburg.