An Interview with Jesse Jacoby, Founder of Emergent LLC
By Amit Ginotra on February 19th, 2014
I had a great opportunity to speak with an entrepreneur and industry expert who I have admired for some time and also had firsthand experience working with.
Jesse Jacoby is the founder of Emergent (www.EmergentConsultants.com) and a recognized expert in business transformation and organizational change leadership. He and his team work with Fortune 500 and mid-market companies across North America to deliver successful people and change strategies, supporting a range of business initiatives including organizational restructurings, technology deployments, shared service implementations, process re-engineering efforts, and mergers.
Mr. Jacoby’s background includes nearly 20 years of management and strategy consulting experience, having led many engagements with Emergent, Booz & Company, and Accenture. His company is the creator of the Accelerating Change & Transformation (ACT) model, and developer of organizational performance tools: New Leader Accelerator (http://NewLeaderAccelerator.com) and Change Accelerator (www.ChangeAccelerator.com), TransformationReady (www.TransformationReady.com).
Prior to his consulting career, he served as the Director of Marketing for Baltimorebased technology company COS, Inc., developing marketing strategies for their online product suite and supporting the company’s growth through two rounds of venture funding, a five-fold organizational expansion, and positioning of the company for eventual acquisition.
Mr. Jacoby holds an MBA from The Johns Hopkins University, as well as a Masters in Communications. He retains close ties with Johns Hopkins, where he has served as Vice President of the University’s Alumni Council and as a member of the Steering Committee for the Carey Business School Dean’s Alumni Advisory Board.
He serves as the Editor for Emergent Insights (Blog.EmergentConsultants.com), and is a contributor to Forrester and SearchSAP.com.
Originally from the East coast, Jesse and his wife Allyson now call the city of Denver their home. Mr. Jesse Jacoby can be contacted at his email jesse@emergentconsultants.com.
[Amit Ginotra] Mr. Jacoby, it is a great pleasure to meet you today and thank you for the opportunity to talk to you and allowing me to learn from your experiences.
[Jesse Jacoby] Thank you for having me, Amit.
[Amit Ginotra] So, tell me a little about how you got started with Emergent? I understand that you have several years of experience with great companies. What was the turning point that you gave up your secure job and started your own venture?
[Jesse Jacoby] Good question, Amit. I come from an entrepreneurial background. The first company I worked for was a technology startup and I have several business owners in my family. I spent more than a decade with large management consulting firms including Accenture and Booze & Co. So, I always wanted to get back to my entrepreneurial roots leveraging the knowledge and skills that I had developed at those larger firms.
[Amit Ginotra] What is the vision and mission of Emergent?
[Jesse Jacoby] Emergent’s mission is to help large and mid-market companies implement their highest priority strategic business initiatives. If you think of a CEO’s top five agenda items for any given year, those are the types of large, complex high stake initiatives that we like to help navigate for them.
[Amit Ginotra] How have the experiences that you have had during your entire career influenced the way you now run Emergent?
[Jesse Jacoby] Over the span of my career, I have had numerous learning experiences and have encountered people who have influenced my leadership style in very specific ways. I have been fortune to work with a few great leaders who have inspired me, and learned from their decision-making and management styles. And I have also seen people who were not so good at managing, and I have learnt from them as well. I have been laid off, so can sympathize with employees when I am working with clients who are implementing downsizing strategies. So, I have had a number of experiences both at personal and professional level that I draw upon to influence upon the way I run the business now.
[Amit Ginotra] Could you give me some examples to illustrate the challenges you faced in starting Emergent?
[Jesse Jacoby] I believe that chance favors those who are prepared. I was fortunate that I didn’t face big challenges, but I believe it was due in large part to the preparation I put into it. In providing professional services to Fortune 500 companies primarily, the biggest challenge was accruing the requisite knowledge, skills, and experience so that I would be credible in the market when I started my business. And in my mind that required at least a decade of large firm management consulting experience that could I could parlay into starting Emergent. Patience was a barrier to letting that decade worth of experience play out before making a move. The other barriers were mostly psychological and personal in nature and they are something most startup entrepreneurs face. There were anxious moments deciding the details of when and how to leave my full time job to start a new venture. Emergent’s business model was service based and therefore not capital intensive, so I was able to absorb the risk and fund the company’s startup myself. It was really about getting prepared mentally and making sure my family was onboard with the increased risk profile. So it was tremendous amount of personal preparation, looking holistically at my life and making sure that it was the right time, and that I was prepared
[Amit Ginotra] So, what do you like so much about Business Transformation and Change Management that it became the theme of your venture?
[Jesse Jacoby] That’s a great question, Amit. I think it goes back to my childhood when I always had a desire to improve things, fix things, deconstruct something to finding out how it worked and putting it back together better. That’s something that has always appealed to me. As I grew up, the way that manifested itself was by helping companies fix problems and improve their situations. Change management and business transformation seem to play perfectly to my background and this interest. What our company does touches upon people, processes, technology, and infrastructure, but it’s always the human dimension that makes this work most interesting. One can engineer a piece of perfect software code or architect the most beautiful building, and I admire those skills greatly. The subjects of my discipline are humans and they are notoriously less predictable. They are complex and are constantly changing. It is that psychological and social dynamic, along with the interplay with commerce, which makes this work endlessly fascinating to me.
[Amit Ginotra] Being an industry expert in the field of Change Management, when you provide consulting to companies, what do you find most worrying?
[Jesse Jacoby] The thing that I see that’s most troubling with regard to change management is that usually there is a misunderstanding about what it is. Many leaders still think change management as synonymous with communication only, but in fact the change management and the consulting that goes with it is much bigger than that. It involves an inspiring vision of the future leadership alignment, organizational assessments, stakeholder engagement strategies, behavior change strategies using performance management systems and competency models, and of course strategic communications. It’s bringing all of those ingredients together in a cohesive plan that helps to drive business transformation. The paradigm shift and education process that’s required of clients is a challenge. When the leaders get it and understand holistic nature of change it’s much easier to do our work but there is usually a learning curve and I am typically the teacher.
[Amit Ginotra] And what do you find most exciting?
[Jesse Jacoby] I love the human dimension, and being able to see the change manifest in people. For example, it’s rewarding to see the fruits of our change and business transformation efforts translating into improved organizational culture. It’s most exciting when our business transformation efforts yield obvious benefits in the forms of improved productivity and the client’s bottom-line.
[Amit Ginotra] I found about the Change Accelerator on Emergent’s website, would you like to give some insight into that?
[Jesse Jacoby] A few years ago, I noticed a gap in the market. Some smaller companies need help implementing organizational change and either can’t afford or don’t require full-blown consulting services. Instead, they would prefer to do it themselves using their own internal resources, but they still need expert tools and methodology. Change Accelerator fills this gap by providing an online change management toolkit that includes a change methodology, tools and templates, assessments and the ability to email an expert consultant for guidance. This gives clients what they need in a costeffective way, while also getting to know our brand. In the future, if they need organizational change management consulting support, we hope they’ll call us.
[Amit Ginotra] New Leader Accelerator Program, that sounds interesting, what is that?
[Jesse Jacoby] The New Leader Accelerator program was born out of necessity based on something I see a lot during business transformation efforts. Inevitably, there are management “shake-ups” that results in new individuals stepping into manager roles and existing managers transitioning to new teams. . New Leader Accelerator is designed as a comprehensive self-paced program to help those newly-transitioned managers be successful in their new roles. It’s a form of step-by-step guide that helps managers be optimally effective during their first year in the new role.
[Amit Ginotra] I our earlier conversations, you mentioned about Emergent’s Organization Transformation Ready tool. Do you want to talk about that?
[Jesse Jacoby] TransformationReady.com is an online assessment tool designed for professionals involved with a business transformation initiative. For example project managers, transformation leads, executive sponsors, or anyone for with a business transformation team can use this tool. It generates a customized profile to show how they are doing with regards to their business transformation effort and then provides them with recommendations and suggestions on how to strengthen their initiative.
[Amit Ginotra] I read some very interesting posts on your Emergent Insights blog and that makes me intrigued about your thought process. How do you decide what to write about?
[Jesse Jacoby] Emergent Insights is our online publication that has been around for nearly three years. It contains numerous practical articles mostly related to people strategy, change management and business transformation. The inspiration comes from the work we do with our clients and what’s trending in the world of business strategy.
[Amit Ginotra] What advice would you give to someone who was considering a career in the field of Business Transformation and Change Management?
[Jesse Jacoby] I would make a distinction between an external consultant in this field and an internal employee who is a practitioner of change management within their organization. Employee practitioners generally tend to live in organizational development teams, Human Resources, or sometimes IT divisions. They need to have the subject matter expertise, which is typically derived from hands-on experiences, training, mentoring, and published methodologies. On the other hand, the external consultants must have solid consulting skills in addition to the aforementioned subject matter expertise. Often, I see the consulting skills confused with the subject matter expertise, but they are most certainly distinct. So, if somebody wants to have career in consulting, they should spend time working for a large management consulting firm where they can hone their consulting skills at the same time they go deep into the change management and business transformation subject matter.
[Amit Ginotra] Mr. Jacoby, it was a great honor talking to you and being able to learn from your experience. Once again, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
[Jesse Jacoby] Thanks Amit. It was my pleasure to participate in your interview.
Amit Ginotra is an experienced Information Technology professional with expertise in Technology Strategy and Transformation. He is also currently enrolled in the Master of Entrepreneurship Degree Program at Western Carolina University. Webmasters and other article publishers are hereby granted article reproduction permission as long as this article in its entirety, author’s information, and any links remain intact. Copyright 2014 by Amit Ginotra.
