CMU marketing professor
and alumnus complete
breakthrough study

Dow study inspires
personality-profiling theory

James Burley and Greg Stevens spent ten years mapping the process as The Dow Chemical Company management turned a division on the verge of divestiture into the company's crown jewel.

Now, Burley, Central Michigan University professor of marketing and hospitality services administration, and CMU alumnus Stevens, owner of WinOvations Inc., a firm specializing in evaluating people and new business development processes, are preparing a larger, more in-depth follow-up article to their award-winning Piloting the Rocket of Radical Innovation.

And this time they have proof of what before had only been theory.

"This is something that Greg and I believe can have a profound impact on the productivity of our economy," Burley said.

Finding the means
of transformation through personality

Using personality-profiling tools, Dow Chemical management reorganized its Polyolefins and Elastomers Research and Development (PO&E R&D) division after identifying the Starters/Innovators and Finishers/Implementers among its employees. They realized they needed both personality types, but they needed to correctly match them to the right jobs.

"The key is that different people are born with different gifts," Burley said. "That's our message. The good news is that we can figure out what someone was born to do well in a 45-minute test."

In their study, Burley and Stevens showed that the degree of personality match with job roles rose from 29 percent in 1991 to 93 percent in 2001. Such a deliberate and rapid cultural shift has never been documented before, as far as Burley and Stevens know.

"By comparison it took Jack Welch over 20 years, by his own reckoning, to get General Electric 50 percent of the way toward being more innovative and agile," Burley said.

Effectively matching personality type with job role leads to maximum creativity and efficiency, which in turn leads to profits. In fact, the changes added billions to Dow Chemical's net value.

"The big difference in our research, compared to others who've done this kind of study, is we've got the proof," Burley said. "We feel very lucky that Dow let us map their process."

Alumnus Greg Stevens, left, and James Burley, professor of marketing and hospitality services administration, are authorities on personality profiling.