Laurence Barton

Dr. Laurence (Larry) Barton was born in 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is President, Chief Executive Officer and Granum Professor of Leadership at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Education
Dr. Barton was raised in Arlington, Massachusetts and attended St. Agnes’ Grammar School and Arlington Catholic High School, graduating in 1974.

He went on to attend Boston College, where he received his AB degree, magna cum laude, in Speech and Communications in 1978. Dr. Barton also holds the MALD (Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy) degree in international business from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (1981), and a PhD degree in Public Affairs and International Communications from Boston University (1983). He earned the Chartered Advisor in Philanthrophy (CAP) designation from The American College in 2011.

Career
A former Professor of Management and Business at Pennsylvania State University Graduate Center at Great Valley, Dr. Barton has also served on the faculties of Boston College and Harvard Business School. In 1989, Dr. Barton joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as Assistant Professor of Management and was named UNLV Business Professor of the Year in 1992, ranking first out of 92 faculty members in academic scholarship and teaching. He was also named 1992 Ascendant Scholar of the Year by the Western Academy of Management.

Dr. Barton left academe in 1995 to become Vice President of communications and public affairs for Motorola where, for the next five years, he served as the Senior Crisis Leader for a company with $31 billion in annual revenue. During this period he led the company investigation into several murders, numerous assaults, suicides and other issues at various facilities worldwide. His research publication record included numerous peer reviewed papers in workplace violence, threat management and law enforcement at dozens of business and academic conferences throughout the world, including at INSEAD/France and Nihon University/Japan. Authors as Experts. 2012.

Dr. Barton left Motorola around 2000 and became President of DeVry University in Phoenix, Arizona. Later he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Heald College, a non-profit, 150 year-old system with twelve campuses in California, Oregon and Hawaii. While at Heald he transformed business and online delivery platforms and was profiled in California CEO Magazine for increasing the graduation rates of minority students to one of the highest in the nation.

On July 1, 2003, Dr. Barton was named the eighth President and Chief Executive Officer of The American College in Bryn Mawr, PA. He also serves as the O. Alfred Granum Professor of Leadership. Under his leadership, the nation’s largest non-profit college devoted to financial service education has introduced new programs in women’s studies, retirement income and a new Ph.D. in financial planning.

Dr. Barton has been named “One of the 100 Most Powerful People in Insurance” by Insurance Newscast, and in 2010 he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from The New York Roundtable. He is a frequent commentator on Fox Business, Bloomberg and CNN regarding violence at work, and was the expert commentator for the 2011 CNN three part special, “When CoWorkers Kill.” His work in threat management and workplace violence prevention is noteworthy. He teaches three courses for federal and state law enforcement as well as private sector leaders at The FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In addition, he serves as a consultant to many leading corporations on issues involving risk mitigation, identifying and managing volatile and potentially violent persons and threat assessment teams. He has spoken at more than 200 programs around the world on issues involving threats by employees, contractors, students, patients and customers and actively managed more than 2800 such cases on behalf of various organizations since 1991.

Books

 * Crisis in Organizations: Managing and Communicating in the Heat of Chaos (1990)
 * Ethics: The Enemy in the Workplace (1995)
 * Crisis in Organizations II (2001)
 * Crisis Leadership Now (2008)
 * Threat Assessment Academy (2012)

Articles

 * "Modeling the Crisis Management Process" in Key Readings and in Crisis Management: Systems and Structures for Prevention and Recovery (2006)
 * "Workplace Violence: Managing the Crisis after a Crisis" in Preventing and Managing Workplace Violence: Legal and Strategic Guidelines (2008)
 * "From Trouble to Trauma: The Need for Public-Private Health Partnerships" in Risk Communication and Public Health (2010)