Author

Dr. Jac Fitzenz

Dr. Jac Fitzenz has published 16 non-fiction and fiction books and over 400 articles based on his wide ranging experiences in naval intelligence and as a business founder.

Dr. Jac, as he is known worldwide, has had three careers. After college, he earned an appointment to the Navy’s Officer Candidate School. Upon graduation he was assigned to naval intelligence. Over the next several years he served across the Pacific in Hawaii, Japan, Taiwan, and The Philippines as the intelligence officer in a nuclear missile unit. Several of his subsequent books would be based on that exploration.

Following his naval service Dr. Jac entered the business world in 1959. After a successful career as a human resources vice president in firms such as Wells Fargo Bank and Motorola in 1978, he developed the first human capital quantitative analysis system. This provided the human resources function, as well as management, with a method for evaluating the return on investment of funds spent on employee acquisition and development.

In 1980, he founded the famous Saratoga Institute to carry on the research and development of that system. By 1985, Saratoga Institute had published the first international HR benchmarking service, eventually covering 1,000 companies in a dozen countries. To date, Dr. Jac has trained more than 90,000 managers in 53 countries on return on investment and predictive analytics.

His contribution of human capital management was recognized when two of his books, Human Value Management (1991) and The ROI of Human Capital (2001) won the Book of the Year Award from the Society for Human Resources Management. His books are translated into Chinese, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

In 2000, he sold Saratoga Institute, staying on as a consultant. In 2004, he left Saratoga and started a personal consulting and training service under the name of Human Capital Source, which continues to date. In 2007, he organized a dozen major corporations and several thought leaders into The Predictive Initiative to explore the emerging concept of predictive analytics. The result was the design of the first human resources predictive and prescriptive analytics package. This was supported later in his 2010 book, The New HR Analytics. He followed this with two co-authored books, Human Capital Analytics (2013) and Predictive Analytics for Human Resources (2015).

Dr. Jac has long been acknowledged as the father of human capital strategic measurement and analysis. Over his long career he has received many awards. In addition to being profiled on the cover of several human resources magazines and winning two Book of the Year Awards, some of the more notable acknowledgements include:

• Society for Human Resources Management cited Dr. Jac as one who has significantly changed what HR does and how it does it.
• Institute for Human Resources Information Management gave him its Chairman’s Award for innovation in HR technology.
• HR World picked him as one of the Top 5 HR management gurus.
• He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources
• Ricardo Palma University in Lima, Peru awarded him an Honorary Doctorate
• Center for Talent Reporting made him its first Lifetime Appreciation Honoree

In 2015, Dr. Jac turned to writing fiction and authored his semi-biographical novel, Rough Waters under the pen name Doctor Jac. Rough Waters covers a number of Dr. Jac’s experiences, from growing up during World War II through his naval intelligence service in Asia Pacific. This was the launch point of the Mike and Grace Novels, a series of the clandestine adventures of the naval intelligence team of LCDR Michael Holmes and his Chinese wife Grace (Liu Chan-juan), a Special Agent of the State Department. The series opened with the publication of Undaunted Lovers (2016), followed by Spies with Benefits (2017). The third book is currently underway.

Dr. Fitzenz has a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in political science, M.A. from San Francisco State in organizational psychology and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in organizational communications.

He resides in a golf community in San Jose, California with his wife Laura.