Bert is an experienced consultant and former senior government official and nonprofit leader with experience guiding organizations and clients through high-wire challenges, strategic reorientation, and change processes.

As a senior consultant to government agencies, national nonprofits and the former CEO of Best Buy, Bert helps his clients navigate complex challenges, adapt their strategies to a rapidly changing world, and design and work through critical changes. At a tech startup he helped lead a project to help a developing nation’s health care system use AI to scale up its response to HIV/AIDS. Through decades of organizational leadership and consulting, he has honed an approach centered on careful research, precise strategic thinking, clear and compelling internal communications, and leadership that brings teams along as co-authors and implementers of change.

At the U.S. Department of Justice, where Bert served as director of public affairs and chief spokesman, Attorney General Janet Reno awarded him the department’s highest honor for his strategic counsel and coordination of media relations through a string of high-profile crises—including the Monica Lewinsky and other independent counsel matters, the Oklahoma City and Unabomber trials, the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, the Microsoft antitrust trial, and hearings about the government’s standoff with the Branch Davidians at Waco. He returned to the Justice Department in 2024 as deputy director of one of its agencies.

Bert collaborates with People-AI-HR on select engagements where strategic clarity, organizational alignment, and disciplined execution are essential. In these engagements, he focuses on transformation architecture and senior stakeholder alignment, working alongside People-AI-HR’s expertise in GenAI strategy, adoption, and HR-enabled impact. Together, this partnership helps clients move from strategy to scalable, credible execution.

Bert has also led change processes as the director of two national nonprofit organizations and the board chair of two others. His other experiences include service as the chief speechwriter for a cabinet leader, as a Congressional staffer, on a presidential transition, at a think tank, and as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He earned his J.D. and B.A. from the University of Virginia.