Richard McDaniel has devoted his career to studying and leading positive change at Cornell, in companies that he has co-founded, and other organizations where he has served as a leader. At the university, this began with a campus-wide effort seeking to achieve "legendary service", guided by famed author of the One Minute Manager series and dedicated Cornell alum, Dr. Ken Blanchard. Early successes led to a more process driven effort to implement 'Total Quality Management' (TQM) called the 'Quality Improvement Process' between 1992 and 1996. Mr. McDaniel supported these efforts both in a leadership role on the Quality Council and as a pioneering practitioner. In 1996 the university embraced "process reengineering" through the adoption of an ERP and again, McDaniel served both as leader and lead implementer. For more than fifteen years he has also served with other senior executives to provide leadership and support in the development and accountability around commonly held institutional values of truth, respect, teamwork, excellence and integrity. Today, McDaniel continues to champion evolving efforts to provide "best in class" support to a world class education and research institution.
While serving as president of the National Association of College Stores, McDaniel wrote a book outlining a simple, easy to follow framework for strategic planning and measurement called Connections. Teaming up with well known author, Dr. Rod Napier, these ideas and tools have been further refined in a new work, entitled Measuring What Matters to be published early in 2006.
Innovations include founding of an e-business firm to provide e-tailing support services (later adopted at more than 370 colleges), pioneering work in supply channel integration, and a strategic role in the mass customization of academic course materials (including the development of the Xerox Documents on Demand and Packbulder products and other foundational work with" print on demand" initiatives). More recent efforts have been directed to cofound the Retail Alliance Inc, a unique undertaking seeking to organize large and prestigious collegiate retail businesses into an efficient "principle-centered virtual chain".