Succession Planning for Small and Family Businesses

William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPLP Fellow, is President of Rothwell and Associates, Inc., a full-service consulting company that specializes in succession planning. He is also a Professor of Learning and Performance in the Workforce Education and Development program, Department of Learning and Performance Systems, at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park campus. In that capacity, he heads up a top-ranked graduate program in learning and performance. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 300 books, book chapters, and articles-including 64 books. Before arriving at Penn State in 1993, he had 20 years of work experience as a Training Director in government and in business. As a consultant, he has worked with over 50 multinational corporations--including Motorola, General Motors, Ford, and many others. In 2004, he earned the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award at Pennsylvania State University, a single award given to the best graduate faculty member on the 23 campuses of the Penn State system. His train-the-trainers programs have won global awards.

Robert K. Prescott, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, has spent twenty years in industry and twenty-two years in teaching and consulting positions. Included in Bob's rich experiences is work in Corporate Engagement at the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama, Graduate Faculty of Management at the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, Director of Executive Education at Penn State and Director of Human Resources for BellSouth Communications, Inc.

His consulting initiatives have placed him in advising and teaching positions with such organizations as AAA, ARAMARK, Deloitte, Delphi Automotive Systems, Estee Lauder, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Lockheed Martin EIS, The National Basketball Association (NBA), Olive Garden Restaurants, Pitney Bowes, Scholastic Book Fairs, The Social Security Administration, T Mobile, UNICEF, Walt Disney World and the U.S. Army. His extensive international work has been with companies such as Corporacion Elite, Ecuador, Grupo Industrial de Monclova, Mexico, Mavesa de Venezuela, Minerven, Mota-Engil, Portugal, and the Bermuda Employers Council.

In both corporate and academic settings, Bob has taught graduate level courses in the Executive Doctorate, MBA and Masters of Human Resources (MHR) programs and business application training in the areas of strategic leadership, agile leadership, organization behavior, influence strategies, human resource management, supervision, and enterprise consulting. He is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in Workforce Education and Development from The Pennsylvania State University. Bob co-authored the books The Strategic Human Resource Leader: How to Prepare Your Organization for the 6 Key Trends Shaping the Future (Davies-Black, 1998), HR Transformation: Demonstrating Leadership in the Face of Future Trends (Davies-Black/SHRM, 2009), and the Encyclopedia of Human Resource Management - Volume One (Wiley, 2012).