Monitor Talent

Jeffrey F. Rayport is a thought leader and practitioner in digital marketing, media, and commerce, with a focus on strategic opportunities enabled by IT innovation, service automation, and mobile computing, particularly as these relate to technology-based information and service businesses.

Among his professional affiliations, Rayport is an Operating Partner at Castanea Partners, a private equity firm focused on multi-channel retail, consumer brands, and marketing services. He is Chairman and Founder of digital strategy consulting company, Marketspace LLC, which he established as a senior partner at Monitor Group. He co-founded several related businesses at the Group, including Monitor Executive Development (a custom executive education business).

Rayport consults and speaks on a variety of topics, including the implications of digital, social, and mobile media for media and advertising services; customer experience and engagement; business model innovation; and competitive advantage in a service economy. In related pursuits, he is a founder of several corporate universities, including at Omnicom Group; Bertelsmann AG; and Amgen. With co-author Bernard J. Jaworski, he has published a series of leading MBA-level textbooks on strategy in a networked economy, and, more recently, a best-selling business book on reinventing service businesses, Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers (HBS Press).

Prior to joining Monitor Group, Rayport was a faculty member at Harvard Business School, where he developed and taught the first e-commerce course in the United States. He introduced “Managing in the Marketspace” as an MBA elective at HBS in 1994 and enrolled nearly 2,000 MBA students while at the School. In building the course, Rayport authored over a hundred case studies. Business plans written by students resulted in dozens of start-ups, including Yahoo! Prior to his leave from HBS, Rayport coined the term “viral marketing.” He also was the only faculty member voted Outstanding Professor for three years in a row by the HBS Students Association.

Rayport is a columnist for BusinessWeek Online. He has written for other publications, including CIO, Financial Times, Fast Company, Forbes.com, Harvard Business Review (and HBR.org), MarketWatch.com, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy & Business, and MIT’s Technology Review. Before HBS, Rayport was a reporter for Fortune, a telecoms analyst for Nikko Securities, and a principal at The Winthrop Group, a consulting firm specializing in the history of business and technology.

Rayport earned an A.B. from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (U.K.); and an A.M. and Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. He has served as a director of a variety of public and private corporations, which currently include Andrews McMeel Universal; GSI Commerce; International Data Group; Monster Worldwide; and Valueclick. Past directorships include Agency.com; Be Free; CBS MarketWatch; and iCrossing (acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2010). As a board director, he has facilitated nearly $2 billion in transactions on exit. He also serves on the International Advisory Board of Fleishman-Hillard and the Advisory Board of Brodeur Partners (both are strategic communications firms affiliated with Omnicom Group). In non-profit work, he is a Trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; and Chairman of the Board of From the Top (the #1 classical music radio and TV program in the United States, featuring gifted young musicians in live performances across the USA, distributed on NPR and PBS) in Boston, MA.