Bonita S. Thompson is a senior human resources executive for global corporations and for 25 years was an HR innovator for six major firms, including Bank of America, Genentech, Levi Strauss, Pacific Telesis, Varian and Catellus.
She is bestselling author of Admired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value, and a member of the Board of Governors of the Hesselbein Institute (formerly Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management). She lectures globally and has taught leadership at John F. Kennedy University.
Her American Management Association webinar, Double Your Value, is featured as an article in Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s book, Coaching for Leadership, which was described as “the single best collection of writings and writers on executive coaching,” according to Professor Warren Bennis at USC/Harvard. She was Director of Research for Stanford Professor Jerry Porras (and coauthors Thompson and Emery) on Success Built to Last, the sequel to Porras and Collins‘ Built to Last.
Bonita earned an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley; and a BA in Industrial Psychology (minor Statistics) from California State University, San Jose. She also holds an Honorary PhD from Mount Mary College.
As a new HR executive, Bonita started her career recruiting the first 200 world-class geneticists to join a newly emerging industry led by pioneer, Genentech, now owned by pharmaceutical giant, Roche. At Levi Strauss, Bonita was on the team that built the first Human Resources Intranet to administer HR online for employees globally. Bonita restructured compensation programs to be more performance driven at Bank of America when it was the world’s largest bank. She created the HR Market Analyzer (a system to alert management about competitive pay) and reclassified 100,000 jobs.
Bonita is a long-term supporter of the Girl Scouts, Save the Children, the Wheelchair Foundation and the Center for Independent Learning (COIL), a California charter school where she focuses on educational empowerment for girls.
