Dr. Carla O'Dell is president of APQC and is considered one of the world’s leading experts in KM. O’Dell has a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t, what’s hype, and what’s solid. Staying on the leading edge of KM is easy for O’Dell because APQC’s members include the best KM professionals and organizations in the world. APQC has conducted 25 consortium studies in KM, with more than 500 participating organizations, and produced the largest body of actionable best practices available in designing, implementing, and measuring KM.
O'Dell led the creation of APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking research, which standardized the processes and measures that more than 9,000 global organizations use to benchmark and improve performance. And with her team at APQC and support of the Intelligent Utility Network, an international consortium of utilities and systems firms, O’Dell helped develop the Smart Grid Maturity Model, now stewarded by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
She wrote with APQC Chairman C. Jackson Grayson "If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice" (The Free Press, 1998), a bestseller that put KM on the map as a practical management discipline. She is also co-author with Grayson of "American Business: A Two Minute Warning" (The Free Press, 1988) and wrote "The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management" (APQC, 2004). She writes frequently for leading journals and magazines and is consistently among the highest-rated speakers at conferences.
O'Dell began her professional career with the Ford Foundation and the American Center for Quality of Work Life. She worked with companies that were just beginning to experiment with new forms of work and new ways to manage people. Joining APQC, O'Dell served as chairperson of the Rewards Conference of the White House Conference on Productivity and helped design the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award emanating from that conference.
O'Dell has a bachelor's degree from Stanford University, a master's degree from the University of Oregon, and a doctorate in organizational psychology from the University of Houston.
