In 1978, at the height of a highly successful teaching and research career, R. John Young, Ph.D. was lured into the private sector by two highly progressive business owners in a small, rural Indiana town. They charged him with creating both a company and a community that would attract the best professionals from their industry. Dr. Young could not resist the personal and professional challenge to apply his academic skills in creating a healthy town and healthy company.

He customized the human resources function to meet the challenge and also founded a rural-based institute of preventive medicine. In the course of evaluating his intervention strategies, he was introduced to the field of prospective medicine, a discipline dedicated to the scientific estimation of health risks and to the communication of those risks to individuals. Dr. Young quickly saw the application of the principles of prospective medicine not only to individual health, but also to organizational health. Later in his career, he served as president of the Society of Prospective Medicine.

In 1983 Dr. Young was recruited to establish an institute for health promotion within one of the largest medical centers in the southeast United States. It was there that he became convinced of the need for an independent business with the bandwidth and dedication to more powerfully address the human factors impacting individual effectiveness, organizational productivity and, most importantly, financial profitability. As he says, "If you don't have a system to become healthy and profitable, you will become part of somebody else's system."

In 1987 Dr. Young founded Corporate Health Services, Inc. in order to help organizations profit from their investment in people. When the company attained international status in 1990, it was renamed the McLaughlin Young Group which now includes McLaughlin Young Consulting, McLaughlin Young Employee Services and the McLaughlin Young Institute.

As Dr. Young explains, "What is inexplicably clear is how the success and failure of executives and by extension businesses is related to human factors. We set out to create an organization that would address all of the places where human factors are either the determinant of success or the saboteur."

The McLaughlin Young Group celebrated 20 Years of Improving Performance in 2007.  From its headquarters in Charlotte, NC, the human capital consulting firm serves some of the largest multi-national corporations.  "To this day, everything we do for our clients is based on a solid academic foundation," says Dr. Young.

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