Robert Downing Cecil,  Chairman and President

R. D. (Bob) Cecil has been chairman and president of R. D. Cecil and Company since 1966. His firm has offered management consulting and training services in the following areas: general management; management, leadership, and organization development; marketing and strategic planning; knowledge management; and county and city economic development planning. He has worked for or with more than eighty different organizations in agriculture, communications, consumer products, education, heavy equipment manufacturing, food processing, government (local, state, and federal), health care, insurance, the military, publishing, and retail sales.

Since receiving his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1968, Mr. Cecil has also been a corporate general manager and controller, a marketing manager, an associate professor of business administration, and a CAPTAIN in the Naval Reserve. Over almost forty years, he has written a total of about 5,000 pages on topics such as general management, leadership, organizational behavior, management and organization development, strategic planning, marketing, knowledge management, and personal development. He has taken more than fourteen full-time years to develop the 2,400-page management training series from which approximately 99.9% of his book, Next-Generation Management Development: The Complete Guide and Resource, was excerpted to be published by the Pfeiffer imprint of John Wiley & Sons (2007). The book is now retitled, Next-Generation Management, Leadership and Organization Development.
 

Mr. Cecil has used portions of that series to train hundreds of management and leadership trainers, training program developers, organization development consultants, and management development and organization development managers from organizations such as IBM (Executive Development Center), AT&T, Sears, Walgreens, Kraft, Baxter, Caterpillar, Illinois Bell, the State of Illinois, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Navy Center for Personal and Professional Development (once the Center for Naval Leadership) [pictured], the Navy Human Resources Management School, and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. [Client List (pdf)]

 

As a professional management and leadership trainer, he has also conducted classes, seminars, and entire on-site, top-down programs involving thousands of students, managers, supervisors, and leaders for or from organizations such as Caterpillar, Dekalb AgResearch, the Civil Service Commission, the American Management Association, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief Pacific Staff, the U.S. Navy, Warner-Lambert, Kable News [pictured], Weyerhauser, and several large hospitals and colleges. Participants in the onsite, top-down program have received either twelve college credits or credits toward MBAs.  [Client List (pdf)]

As a management consultant, R. D. Cecil has facilitated very comprehensive and in-depth marketing analyses and strategic planning processes for companies in the steel, healthcare, home improvement, and magazine fulfillment industries.

Mr. Cecil is the originator of several innovative concepts, methods, models, and tools:

Unified Practice of Management^TM model  (shows how 100 major management concepts processes, and models all fit and can work together in a fully integrated system, thereby illustrating a unified field theory of many aspects of management)

The Managerial Target^®  (descriptive, explanatory, and prescriptive managerial and leadership style model)

Integrated ("Next-Generation") MD/OD Project  (management training is leveraged by using it as the core of, and vehicle for, more effective participation in an OD project)

Zero-Base (Meta-)Systems Analysis (ZBSA)  (concept, methodology, and tools)

Qualitative (Tacit) Information Bases (QIBs)  (concept, methodology, and associated tools)

Diagrammatic Knowledge Bases (DKBs) (concept, methodology, and associated tools)

Mr. Cecil has used his computerized marketing, organizational behavior, operations, and financial factor checklists―and his innovative, computerized strategic planning and knowledge management materials, methods, and tools―to computer assist the facilitation of marketplace, organizational, and business environment analyses and strategic planning porcesses for companies in the steel, home improvement, healthcare, and service industries.

All of Cecil's management, leadership, and organizational development education/training materials, and all of his management consulting tools and methods, are now available on the company's new Strategic Management & Leadership System™

Many academicians and practitioners have praised Bob Cecil's comprehensive, in-depth, and monumentally innovative works.  [Comments]

For a number of years, R. D. Cecil was a member of the American Society for Training and Development or ASTD (now ATD), the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Academy of Management (AOM) and the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (OBTS).

After serving for twenty-four years as a Supply Corps officer in the the U. S. Naval Reserve, Captain Cecil retired in 1987. He commanded an all-officer Naval Reserve unit attached to the Chicago regional contract administration office of the Defense Logistics Agency. As a reserve “four-striper,” he served as Team Chief of the Logistics Center at U.S. Commander-in-Chief Pacific Staff during several world war exercises. These experiences led to his design of a PC-based logistics management and planning tool for the USCINCPAC Logistics Directorate. As a direct result of that project, the Pentagon contracted Rand Corporation to develop a full-blown, world-wide, mainframe-based system. Rand hired Cecil as a consultant on the project. So it can be said that he is at least "the grandfather" of a computerized tool the military is now using to help manage wartime logistics. Even as a reservist he has earned the Joint Service Commendation and Achievement Medals and the Navy Commendation Medal.

Mr. Cecil has traveled as a tourist in thirty countries around the world and holds one registered patent, several trademarks, and many literary and musical copyrights.

Contact Information:

R. D. Cecil and Company

1151 Middle Road — Suite B

Dixon, Illinois  61021-3904

Sales and Support

Telephone:

1-815-312-2571

Hours:  10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Central (Chicago) Time, Monday through Friday

Fax: as above, but call ahead

E-mail:  rdc1@rdcecil.com

Copyright © 2025 by R. D. Cecil and Company             Last edited or revised:  1/04/2025