Jim Williams

A demonstrated thought leader and change agent, Jim has worked at the forefront of the Human Resources evolution to transform how organizations understand the relationship between their Talent and business outcomes. His work in this area spans a number of Fortune 500 companies as well as management consulting. At Fiserv he is responsible for the identification and acquisition of Talent required to deliver breakthrough business results. He also focuses on providing the performance, team, and culture programs that help unlock innovation and collaboration across the enterprise. Additionally, he delivers analytic insights and decision support tools to help the organization optimize Talent at the speed of business.

Previously to Fiserv Jim worked for Boeing where he built and delivered the first ever Global Talent Strategy; a global architecture to drive international diversification, workforce segmentation, L&D improvements, and prioritization of critical functional transformations. He worked with C-Suite owners on their functional transformations for both internal workforces and post M&A activities to better maximize talent, systems, and resulting designs for productivity and innovation.

Prior to Boeing Jim led General Motor’s strategy and transformation design efforts, his work included creating differentiated organizational frameworks for core and growth businesses, enterprise wide culture initiatives, embedded new mobility vision through senior leader working groups and product design workshops, and successfully led business cases for new systems to enable modernization of employee experience.

He also did pioneering work at IBM, in close partnership with their Corporate Strategy team, that helped guide the reorganization of its current operations as well as AQs. He provided the underlying analysis that ultimately produced the “People Strategy” function; tasked with designing the future business/workforce model. Additionally, he designed and optimized global resource deployment, supported global business unit restructuring (both legacy divestiture and growth AQs), and was part of a core team that stood up one of IBMs largest growth plays.

Jim came to IBM from Booz Allen where he won the firms highest innovation award in their annual ideas festival. While there he both created assets for and delivered, evidence based strategies to companies at the C-suite level. His work spanned organizational design, M&A, as well as the full talent lifecycle. Most notably he created an analytic based strategic human capital capability that helps clients test organizational strategies pre-deployment.

Earlier in his career, Jim helped manufacturing clients with labor bargaining, business process reengineering and strategic human capital planning. He also worked at Danaher corporation a renowned growth business that used lean manufacturing to double in size every 4-6 years. While there he worked on post M&A projects and learned how to apply lean to organizational processes. One constant thread throughout his career is that he has been a developer of talent, who measures his success as a leader, not by those he leads, but by the careers he’s helped enable.

Jim earned his Masters of Labor Relations and Human Resources from Michigan State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science, Economics & Business from MSU as well.