Dr. Harvey Blustain is President of Act IV Consulting, Inc.  His career has included positions in academia, international development, market research, corporate consulting, and entrepreneurial start-ups. 

For the past eleven years Harvey has focused on higher education as President of Act IV Consulting and, prior to that, as a Director in the Coopers & Lybrand/ PricewaterhouseCoopers National Higher Education Consulting Practice.   

Harvey has consulted extensively with numerous corporations in the areas of strategic human resources, competency-based professional development, sales strategy, and globalization.  His clients have been in a range of industries, including information technology, telecommunications, healthcare and insurance, manufacturing, financial services, agriculture, and government.  Past clients include Xerox, General Electric, EDS, AT&T, the US Agency for International Development, and the Government of Jamaica. His international experience spans work in western and eastern Europe, South Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, Africa and the Middle East.

Harvey also enjoyed a brief foray into the dot-com world.  On leaving PwC, he joined HotDispatch, an online marketplace for technical expertise, as Vice President for Sales and Marketing, with responsibility for competitive analysis, marketing strategy, and partnerships. 

He has over three dozen professional publications, and his articles have appeared in the NACUBO Business Officer, EduCause Cause/Effect, and AGB Trusteeship. He has spoken to a variety of higher education audiences, including NACUBO, EACUBO, CACUBO, CAUSE, and the Council of Independent Colleges.        

Harvey received his BA from New York University and his MPhil and PhD in cultural anthropology from Yale University.  His doctoral work, a study of Hindu-Muslim relations in a Himalayan village, was based on two years in Nepal.  A postdoctoral position at Cornell's Center for International Studies included three years of research in Jamaica on natural resource management.  He taught at the University of Kentucky.

The Young Academic

Associates

Act IV Consulting works with other consultants to bring the right mix of skills to each client engagement.  Our partners include:

Goldstein and Associates

Phil Goldstein is the founder and President of Goldstein & Associates LLC.  Goldstein & Associates is an independent consulting firm specializing in providing general management consulting support to higher education.  Prior to founding Goldstein & Associates, Phil has had over 14 years of experience as a consultant and university administrator in higher education.  Phil started his career at Coopers & Lybrand where he provided operations improvement and strategy consulting to colleges and universities.  After C&L merged to become PricewaterhouseCoopers, Phil became one of the Partners in charge of higher education consulting.  His roles included leader of operations and strategy consulting on the East Coast and national leader of the PwC ERP implementation practice for higher education. 

 Phil also worked for the University of Pennsylvania .  While at Penn, Phil led Penn to Business a subsidiary of the University that facilitated the development of innovative new revenue opportunities at Penn.   In this capacity, Phil had responsibility for a business incubator program and corporate relations and advised Penn’s Deans on opportunities to generate additional revenue through new educational programs.  

Sheep Pond Associates

Sheep Pond Associates was founded in 1998 to provide market research and best practices consulting about Internet and high technology issues in the corporate and higher education marketplace.  Sheep Pond’s principal, Judith A. Pirani, has twenty years of experience in conducting market research and consulting.  Judy has extensive hands-on experience managing and conducting various types of research including quantitative and qualitative market research, survey design and analysis, competitive analysis, end user benchmarking and case studies, forecast modeling, and strategic marketing and planning.

Sheep Pond Associates has teamed with Act IV Consulting on a number of other projects, including the development of a web strategy for Tufts University, research on the corporate training market for WebCT, and an analysis of Cisco’s e-learning strategy for the Higher Education Funding Council of England.

Executive Alliance

Executive Alliance is a Human Resource consulting firm providing services in information systems.  Kevin Mallett, the Principal and founding member, has over 25 years of broad information management experience with systems residing on mainframe, midrange, workstation, and microcomputer platforms.  Kevin’s client activities focus on helping organizations to develop a vision and strategy for information systems, as well as conducting needs analysis, defining requirements, evaluating and selecting vendors, and planning and managing system implementations.  He has provided services to the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, the University of Massachusetts system, and Brandeis University.  He is a faculty member of Bentley College's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and serves as a Director for the New England chapter of the Human Resource Systems Professionals (HRSP).

Executive Alliance and Act IV have teamed at Connecticut College, the University of Maine System, and Brown University to assist the institutions with the selection of administrative systems.