Dr. Jerry Willbur (Dr. J) has consulted nationally and internationally with several large multi-billion-dollar organizations. He served over twenty years as a senior officer with two multi-billion-dollar corporations, ServiceMaster and SC Johnson. Dr. Willbur also started up and led several successful startups in the education, healthcare, and high-tech fields, including one that was awarded the National Chamber of Commerce’s Blue-Chip Award for best fast growth small company. One organization he helped establish, Help One Student to Succeed (HOSTS) won numerous national awards for its work with mentoring challenged learners in public schools.

With a BA and MA in psychology and a doctorate in human resource development, he is the author of two leadership books published by Corby Books of Notre Dame (available through the Leadership Mentoring Institute) and a 2018 fiction book involving mentoring called The True-Blue Revolution. His second fiction book titled Rise of the True-Blue Rebellion was published in November 2023. The third in the series called The True-Blue Renaissance will be published in 2025.

He is an award-winning researcher in the field of mentoring with his dissertation on achievement motivation and mentoring being selected as the best in the field by American Society of Training and Development (ASTD). He has had twelve peer reviewed articles published by the University of New Mexico’s Journal of Mentoring and Coaching and continues to speak at major mentoring conferences. As an organizational psychologist he helped develop several high-performance organizational cultures and is often referred to as ‘the culture doctor.’ He states that it all starts with the selection, development and mentoring of effective leaders at all levels of the organization. He currently serves on the board of several foundations and is a former board member and Vice President emeritus for the International Mentoring Association. He also served on a mentoring advisory board for several years for British Petroleum and the Imperial College of London, helping to develop young engineers and scientists. His special love is creating mentoring programs to help children succeed. He developed the Mentor Success program, now called Inspire success, for His Heart Foundation in 2017 to teach leadership success skills to young children (www.inspiresuccesskids.com). He was a founding member of His Heart Foundation and currently serves on the board of The Live Your Dream Foundation as an Executive Committee member. (www.theliveyourdreamfoundation.org)). The original Mentor Success program, now called Inspire Success (www.inspiresuccesskids.com), was selected and highlighted by the University of New Mexico’s International Mentoring Institute as an outstanding program based on their results with grade K-5 students.

If Dr. Willbur was asked to describe who he is he would say he is an ‘evangineer’ and a maximizer, i.e. being an advocate and implementer for new ideas to help people and organizations succeed. The goal of the Leadership Mentoring Institute where he is now CEO is to nurture and guide the development of mentoring programs in various settings and for all audiences.

He can be reached at jwillbur3@aol.com or jerry.willbur@inspiresuccesskids.com