Barry Dornfeld

Principal

Skills/Knowledge/Abilities
Recent Projects
Professional Facts
Selected Writing

Barry Dornfeld—co-leader of the firm’s Life Sciences practice area—brings a wide diversity of experience in business, organizations and higher education to his consulting work, and to his speaking and teaching platforms. He is a member of CFAR’s Collaboration and Change implementation groups, and has consulted to organizations on top team collaboration, leadership development, strategy, and governance, helping clients effect sustainable change and achieve lasting performance improvement.

Barry also lectures on topics including negotiation, influence and persuasion, and designs and facilitates leadership development programs that use applied methods of development and learning, including action learning, using real business issues current within the organization as context. He teaches within client organizations, and in the Executive Education division of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and at other institutions around the world.

Barry’s recent work in the life sciences world has focused on ways to help organizational leaders maximize value across strategic partnerships such as those with academic medical centers and medical professional societies. The objective of this work is to optimize the investments in these organizational relationships relative to basic research, clinical research and trials, scientific information exchange, marketing, and educational curricula and programming. He has also taught classes in negotiation, influence and persuasion to a number of cohorts of high potential pharma leaders in the Wharton Executive Education program.

He holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, and taught at New York University and the University of the Arts. He also has more than twenty-five years experience as an anthropologist, media researcher, and documentary filmmaker. (He directed the 2010 film, “Eatala: A Life in Klezmer,” a documentary of four generations of a Klezmer musician family produced by the Philadelphia Folklore Project with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Skills/Knowledge/Abilities

• Systems Thinking - Understands the complex ripple effects set off by actions taken in one part of an organizations or industry.
• Executive and Organizational Development - Builds capabilities that support strategic objectives.
• Analytic Insight - synthesizes diverse sources of information into a coherent story.

Recent Projects

• For a large global corporation, directed the Action Learning component of a three year Wharton Executive Education program.
• For a global pharmaceutical company, assessed ways to optimize investments across an array of external partners and alliances.
• For a national medical association, clarified their decision-making processes to improve the working relationships between their Board and members of the senior staff team.
• For a major hospital system, he worked with the top team to reorganize care management across the network.

Professional Facts

Co-leader of CFAR's Life Sciences practice area.

Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Board Member, Philadelphia Human Resource Planning Society.

University of the Arts, Philadelphia—Developed a new academic program in communication .

Documentary filmmaker for more than 20 years, with numerous broadcasts, grants and awards.

Selected Writing and Speaking

"Apps Come to the Office: Social Media and Organization Development." In Practicing OD: An Online OD Network Magazine. 2010

"Social Capital, Civic Space, and the Digital Revolution: Emerging Strategies for Public Broadcasting."
In Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest.

Producing Public Television. Princeton University Press. 1998.

"Dear America: Transparency, Authority and Interpretation in a Vietnam War Documentary," From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War Film. Rutgers University Press.