Dr. Stephen Hollingshead, a Management Consultant & Ethicist, advises clients on effective organization, performance measurement, and embedding the power of ethical decision-making into company culture. Using management principles based on philosophical realism (think Drucker meets Aristotle) he helps leaders and their employees choose among competing goods in order to achieve excellence as individuals, teams, and organizations.
Background
Stephen Hollingshead grew up in an entrepreneurial family; his father ran companies in Michigan, California, Guam, Minnesota, and Texas. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school. But 10 years later, he had a Ph.D., had taught government at the university level, and had become the youngest ever winner of a primary election for US Congress.
Another 10 years after that, he had co-founded one school and turned another into a National Blue Ribbon School, written a book on Shakespeare's politics, been a marketing executive, started two companies, and acted as executive director of a national tax reform group.
Later, Dr. Hollingshead served in the Bush Administration as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Enforcement. His management skills were recognized by the White House and the Office of Personnel Management with a $25,000 Award for Extraordinary Merit (rare for a political appointee). While he was coordinating the President’s Management Agenda for HUD, the Government Accountability Office removed HUD from its High Risk List for the first time ever. Dr. Hollingshead, the $40 Billion Department’s chief enforcement official, realigned the Department’s enforcement centers; he managed offices in six cities; analyzed and re-engineered business processes, codifying best practices across the offices; initiated consolidation and modernization of IT systems; vigorously addressed personnel and management problems with an emphasis on changing the enforcement culture. The result? During the first nine months of his leadership, the longstanding aged case backlog went from 4.500 cases to fewer than 1,600. By the time he left office, that backlog was essentially eliminated. Dr. Hollingshead also epresented the HUD Secretary on the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities and the President’s Adult Education Working Group.
More recently, Dr. Hollingshead was the COO of Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, which are 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 corporations, respectively. These organizations seek to promote the benefits of limiting government intrusion into free markets. As COO, he supervised the directors of the various departments, including Policy, Marketing, Communications, Development, Programs, State Operations, Human Resources, Finance, and Legal Counsel. He also led the formation of a policy initiative that raised $4.5 million in 60 days.
Dr. Hollingshead and his wife are the proud parents of 13 children, the youngest of whom was born in May, 2011.
