The most recent of his ten books is a new and expanded second edition of his best-seller, Managing Transitions (2003), and the updated second edition of Transitions (2004), which together have sold over one million copies.  Before that he published The Way of Transition (2000), a partly autobiographical study of coming to terms with profound changes in his own life and transforming them into times of self-renewal. And before that, he published Creating You & Co. (1997), a handbook for creating a work-life that not only survives, but capitalizes on today's frequent and disruptive changes.

For nearly three decades, he has guided thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations through the maze of organizational transition. In the professional seminars that he launched in 1988, more than 3,500 trainers and consultants from all over the world have been certified to conduct transition-management programs within organizations. In the U.S., the organizations that he has worked with include Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, CNA, Qualcomm, Kaiser Permanente, Amoco, Astra-Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Time-Warner Telecom, Stanford University, the US Department of Health and Human Services, AT&T, the US Veterans Administration, and Intel, as well as a dozen hospitals in the U.S. and Canada.  He has also worked with companies and public agencies in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, and the U.K. He is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and corporate meetings in the United States and abroad.

Educated originally in the humanities at Harvard, Columbia, and Brown Universities, he was (until his own career change in 1974) a professor of American Literature at Mills College, Oakland, CA. He is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. The Wall Street Journal listed him as one of the top ten independent executive development presenters in America.