Lewis Perelman

Lewis J. Perelman, president of Kanbrain Institute, has provided strategic consulting advice since 1983 to public and private policymakers concerned with technology, institutional change, human resource, and economic development issues. His private consulting clients have included IBM, Apple Computer, National Computer Systems, Hay Group, Ashton-Tate, L.F. Rothschild, National Education Corp., the Edison Electric Institute, and other companies contending with the acute organizational and human resource challenges of rapidly changing markets, technologies, and public policies. Several electric utility companies, for example, sought Perelman's help in strategic rethinking of organizational cultures resulting from the impending transition from a regulated-utility to a competitive-market environment.

Perelman is executive editor of the monthly newsletter Knowledge Inc., and the author of the best-selling book School's Out (Avon Books, 1993), based in part on his work as a senior research fellow of the Hudson Institute. Writing and publication of the book were completed while Perelman was a fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

As a senior research fellow of the Hudson Institute from 1989 to 1992, Perelman worked on the celebrated Workforce 2000 project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor. His report for the project, "The American Learning Enterprise in Transition," which forecast the transformation of human resource requirements by emerging information technology, was submitted by the Labor Department for publication by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris, 1990). Perelman became director of Project Learning 2001, a study sponsored by twelve U.S. corporations and foundations concerned with finding ways to meet the fast-changing human resource conditions charted in Workforce 2000.

From 1981 to 1983 Perelman was director of business intelligence in the corporate planning department of Holiday Corp. in Memphis where he developed one of the first designs for the kind of corporate intelligence network recently dubbed "intranet." From 1979 to 1981, he was a senior scientist in the Social Systems Group at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During that period he served as an adviser to the President's Commission on Three Mile Island. In 1980, as a visiting scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, he produced a study of the limitations of computer models as guides to economic policy. Previously he was staff economist at the Colorado Division of Transportation Planning, where he was credited with saving taxpayers over $100 million in unnecessary costs. Later he designed the evaluation process for a $400 million federal R&D program at the Solar Energy Research Institute.

Perelman coined the phrase "The Learning Enterprise" to denote the new economy's fusion of work and learning in a report with that title published by the Council of State Planning Agencies in 1985. And his study for the Western Governors' Association, "Human Capital Investment for State Economic Development" (1989), the first attempt to chart the entire "portfolio" of a state's many investments in human resource development, became a widely discussed exposé of inherently misfocused and unproductive government policies. Perelman's first book, The Global Mind (Mason/Charter, 1976), cited one of the year's best scientific-technical books by the Library Journal, anticipated the transforming impact of the global Internet and World Wide Web.

Perelman's writing has appeared in such major publications as Business Week, Forbes ASAP, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Success, Insight, and the French magazine ACTUEL, as well as professional journals such as TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences, New Management, Strategic Planning Management, Planning Review, Human Capital, and Ethics.

Perelman's work in human resource development, technology, and economic policy has been widely discussed in the national press, cited in legislative testimony, and used in university courses. He has taught graduate courses at Harvard University and the George Mason University School of Business Administration, and has conducted a variety of seminars and workshops for leaders in business, government, and academic organizations. He has made speeches and presentations of his work before numerous audiences throughout the United States and in Europe and Pacific Asia, both live and on radio and television broadcasts. He also has testified before congressional, state, and local legislative committees as well as executive boards and commissions.

Perelman earned a doctorate in a special program of independent study at Harvard University focused on the ecology of learning and cognitive systems. He graduated cum laude with a BS in mathematics from the City College of New York, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He did graduate study in space and atmospheric physics and applied mathematics at the Goddard Institute and at the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics. Lewis Perelman has been cited in Who's Who, and is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the National Press Club.