Bill Kane

New Book! Leading Business Teams: The Definitive Guide to Optimizing Organizational Performance

In a rapidly changing world, businesses must create a high-performing, metrics-driven workplace environment characterized by respect, inclusion, teamwork, innovation, and overall harmony—and it must be manageable and sustainable. Building upon the coaching principles of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden and his own 35 years of experience as a human resources leader, Bill Kane has created the SCORE framework to guide people managers in creating and nurturing effective teams and steering their organizations through times of change: 

• Staffing: Attracting and selecting talent; 
• Cultivating culture: Defining how people should interact; 
• Organizing and planning: The need for direction and focus; 
• Reinforcing desirable behavior: Managing performance; and 
• Engaging your team: A leader’s role and responsibility.

Learn more:  bit.ly/LeadingBusinessTeams_Book

Bill Kane joined the faculty at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations in the Fall of 2022. Prior to joining Rutgers, Bill was a highly accomplished practitioner in the Human Resources field with broad and deep experience in all aspects of functional leadership across multiple industries in the Fortune 500. A Chief Human Resources Officer at the age of 39, he has been a trusted advisor to CEO’s, leadership teams, and boards. He has specific expertise in leading, planning, and executing the people strategy associated with profitable business transformations.

Bill has worked for FMC Corporation, Frigidaire/Electrolux, International Flavors & Fragrances, Kyowa Pharmaceutical, Inc., and Sumitomo Corporation (PE model). Some of his pioneering efforts have included leading large-scale change management initiatives, designing global organizational architecture, linking stock vesting to share price, creating a cultural blueprint to return a company to Fortune's “most admired” list, redesigning a company’s healthcare benefits program using a participative approach, introducing “multi-craft trades” into a unionized environment, driving cross-functional performance evaluation, and returning a major company to profitability in 16 months as part of the first “pre-packaged” bankruptcy turnaround in the state of New Jersey.

A lifelong learner, Bill earned his PhD at the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. His dissertation focused upon the mentoring of high-potential, future-leading women in the workplace. He holds three master’s degrees: an MA from Fielding in human & organizational systems, an MBA in management, and an MA in organizational psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has taken executive education programs at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and his undergraduate degree is from Rutgers College.

Bill is a former elected board member of the Smithsonian Science Education Center. In addition, he was an adjunct professor for many years. He has been active in several HR organizations and his business perspective has been shared in multiple media outlets.

Bill is the author of The Truth about Thriving in Change, which has been translated into Chinese, Russian, and Arabic. He also collaborated with the late John Wooden, UCLA's legendary basketball coach, and Andy Hill, one of his former players, to create a team-building and leadership paradigm for leaders seeking to take their teams toward optimized and sustained performance. Bill is an executive/organizational coach, certified by the IECL (Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership, Sydney, Australia).