Jack Steele became immersed in performance excellence and strategy execution during his twenty-year career at Florida Power & Light. Throughout the 1980s, Jack was instrumental in this electric utility’s corporate-wide quality management effort, which paid off in 1989 when FPL became the first company outside of Japan to win the prestigious Deming Prize for Quality Management.

Interest in FPL’s success story became so great that 400 of the Fortune 500 companies visited the utility company during this period. Jack led these benchmarking visits as part of a FPL’s newly formed instructional and consulting arm.

In 1991, Jack began to apply the incredible wealth of knowledge learned during the Deming process as an independent consultant. He co-founded and served as Executive Vice President of Competitive Technologies International, which provided results-oriented business consulting to an international client base, resulting in a wide range of performance breakthroughs.

As a consultant to Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation, for example, Jack was able to help drive revenues from $2 to $7 billion over a four year period, while more than doubling return on equity, driving Customer Satisfaction from 80% up to 94%, and Employee Satisfaction from 66% to 78%. In another striking case of Strategy Execution success, Jack consulted with a division of AT&T, resulting in a reduction of defects from 150 to 15 per 10,000, and a resulting surge in market share.

In 1997, Jack went from external consultant to internal driver of Strategy Execution when he became President and CEO of a sales force automation software company. By applying these techniques, he helped drive dramatic performance improvements across the organization. This experience helped inspire the founding of ActiveStrategy in February 2000 by Jeff Bunting, with Jack Steele and Michael Brazukas as co-founders. ActiveStrategy was the first organization in the world dedicated to developing and deploying enterprise-wide software for corporations seeking to harness the power of Enterprise Strategy Execution.

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