Castanea Partners

As the founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a strategy practice that works with leading companies to radically reinvent how they interact with customers and markets. Marketspace is a unit of Monitor Group, a global strategy services and merchant banking firm.

As a senior partner at Monitor, Jeffrey founded several business units in the firm, including Marketspace and Monitor Executive Development -- a customized executive education unit -- and is a founding faculty member of several corporate universities, including at Omnicom Group (NYSE:OMC), Bertelsmann AG, and Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN).

Prior to Marketspace, Jeffrey was a faculty member at Harvard Business School where he developed and taught the first e-commerce course in the United States. While at Harvard, Jeffrey introduced his course, “Managing Marketspace Businesses,” that resulted in dozens of student led high-tech start-ups, including Yahoo! Prior to his leave from HBS, Jeffrey coined the term “viral marketing.” Jeffrey continues to teach in various executive programs at the School.

Jeffrey is a columnist for BusinessWeek Online and has written for other publications, including CIO, Financial Times, Fast Company, Forbes.com, Harvard Business Review, MarketWatch.com, McKinsey Quarterly, Optimize, and Strategy & Business. As a keynote speaker, he is represented exclusively by the Washington Speakers Bureau and speaks on strategies for customer engagement to drive growth, with a specialization in media and entertainment, retail, and financial services. Jeffrey also co-authored a series of leading MBA-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy (including e-Commerce, Cases in e-Commerce, and Introduction to e-Commerce), and recently published a bestselling business book on reinventing service businesses, Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers.

Jeffrey has served as a director of both public and private corporations, which currently include Andrews McMeel Universal; GSI Commerce (NASDAQ:GSIC); International Data Group; iCrossing; Valueclick (NASDAQ:VCLK), and Monster Worldwide (NYSE:MWW). Past directorships have included Agency.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), Be Free (NASDAQ:BFRE), and CBS MarketWatch (NASDAQ: MKTW). He serves on the International Advisory Board of Fleishman-Hillard and the Advisory Board of Brodeur Partners (both strategic communications firms of Omnicom; NYSE:OMC). In the non-profit sector, Jeffrey is a Trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum; a Director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust; and Chairman of the Board and a Director of From the Top, a classical music public television and radio show distributed by PBS and National Public Radio.