C. Jackson Grayson Jr., D.B.A., Founder and Chairman
C. Jackson Grayson Jr., founder and chairman of APQC, has enjoyed a widely diverse professional career. His academic, experience includes professorships at Harvard, Stanford, Tulane, and Southern Methodist University (SMU), where he became known for instituting innovations in business education. This extensive background in education led to the founding of APQC.
Grayson became nationally known in 1971, when he was appointed chairman of the U.S. Price Commission during the period of price-wage controls.Though few liked controls, Grayson was accorded national recognition by the press, business people, and labor unions for his fair and firm administration of the controls and for helping to remove them.
During this period, Grayson became aware of how important productivity was to the economic well-being of the nation, how American productivity growth had begun to slow, and how competition from abroad had begun to rise. He was one of the first people in the nation to sound the alarm about sagging productivity and competitiveness. After he left Washington, Grayson returned to the private sector and founded the American Productivity Center, now known as APQC, to address these challenges.
As one of the leaders in the first White House Conference on Productivity, Grayson actively fostered the national dialogue that led to the creation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Later, he and his staff created APQC's International Benchmarking Clearinghouse to help organizations identify and learn from best practices, both nationally and internationally.
In 1996 Grayson created APQC's education initiative to help education institutions restructure academic and administrative processes by identifying, adapting, and implementing best practices found in all sectors including education, business, health care, and government. The initiative focuses on benchmarking process improvement and innovation, quality improvement, knowledge management, use of data, knowledge sharing, and the transfer of best practices.
Grayson is a CPA and has served on the boards of directors of a number of large corporations. His career, however, is not confined to business. Grayson believes in variety, constant learning, experimentation, and fun. His career has comprised being a reporter for a New Orleans newspaper, a special agent of the FBI, a manager of a cotton farm in northern Louisiana, a member of an export-import firm, an owner of race horses, a pilot of a single-engine airplane, and a skydiver on his 75th birthday.
He is the author of many magazine and newspaper articles and four books, two of which were written with APQC President Carla O'Dell: If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice (The Free Press, 1998) and American Business: A Two-Minute Warning (The Free Press, 1988).
Grayson holds a bachelor's from Tulane University, an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a doctorate in business from the Harvard Business School. In 2000, he was named one of the Most Admired Knowledge Leaders by Teleos and Work Frontiers International. In 2006, Grayson was honored by SMU for his leadership and innovation with an endowed MBA scholarship in entrepreneurial studies and an annual faculty innovation award in his name.
He is currently working full-time on APQC Education's initiatives, to bring process benchmarking to the forefront of the K-12 education system and process improvement to districts across the nation.
