John M. Gibbons

John Gibbons comes to the Conference Board with more than 15 years in the field of Human Resources management. His career has spanned a number of industries, including financial services, consumer products, health care, international logistics and supply chain services, and retail. Most recently, John served as Director of Human Resources for Gap, Inc. where he was responsible for all HR support for the company's Northeast operations, representing more than 450 stores, 18,000 employees, and $1.4 billion in annual revenues.

The son of a poet and a mathematician, John's approach to Human Resources can be characterized by a combination of intuition and rigorous analysis. In addition to serving in senior-level generalist and management roles, John has also rotated through a number of HR specialties including Organizational Development, Compensation, and Staffing. Some of John's career highlights include:

• Introducing a new $1.5 million centralized staffing service for urban markets at the Gap, resulting in increased annual revenues of more than $20 million.
• Leading a global training evaluation project for the Gap, involving collecting employee feedback (both quantitative and qualitative) across 7 countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.
• Establishing the very first Human Resources department in North America for Nippon Express, the fourth largest commercial shipping company in the world.
• Reducing Nippon Express' North American employee relations costs and voluntary turnover rate by 90% and 40%, respectively, in three years.
• Leading a cross-cultural organizational re-engineering initiative for Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan, New England's largest health care insurer, thus expanding the company's clinical services and market visibility to the Latino, Chinese, Portuguese, and Caribbean communities.
• Designing a new field sales and service workforce deployment plan using geographic information technology (GIT) modeling for Liz Claiborne.

Since joining the Conference Board in November John has become involved in a number of topic areas including human capital metrics, employee engagement, workforce diversity, and human resources offshoring. He is currently developing the organization's report on the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act and is also slated to serve as the lead researcher for an upcoming working group on Engaging a Global Workforce.

John is also leading a broad new initiative that will involve an evidence-based approach to examining the role of human capital in creating and building financial value.

John has a Master of Science in Organizational Psychology from Purdue University and a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Communication from Ohio University.