William Bridges has been a leader in the field of transition management since 1980 when his best-selling book, Transitions: Making Sense of Lifes' Changes was published. He is an internationally known speaker, author, and consultant who advises individuals and organizations in how to deal productively with change. His ten books include an expanded third edition of his best-seller, Managing Transitions (2009), 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. He published Creating You & Co. (1997), a handbook for creating a work-life that capitalizes on today’s frequent and disruptive changes, and the ground-breaking Jobshift.
For three decades, he has guided thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations through the maze of the transitions that accompany change. The professional seminars that he launched in 1988 have now certified more than 5,000 mangers, trainers and consultants worldwide to conduct Transition Management programs. His U.S. clients have 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. His later work has focused on bringing the principles of Transition Management into the non-profit world, most notably the Andrus Family Fund. He has been 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.