Joe Harold Harless was born in Brownsville, Alabama, on November 12, 1940. After graduating from Tuscaloosa County High School in 1958, he enrolled at the University of Alabama, graduating in the Spring of 1962 with a B.S. in psychology and English. In 1976, Harless earned an Ed.D. in educational psychology from The Catholic University of America and, in 1999, a Ph.D. in Religious Education from the American College of Metaphysical Theology.

In the Spring of 1962, Harless was accepted to the Medical School of the University of Miami. However, he decided to join TOR (Theories of Reinforcement) Education, Inc., a New York City training company which was one of the first commercial companies to produce programmed instruction. There Harless worked with former University of Alabama psychology professor Dr. Thomas Gilbert who introduced him to Mathetics, a new and revolutionary method of teaching analysis in which the behavior of any given subject is broken down into its smallest steps, analyzed, and written into self-instructional lessons. While at TOR, Harless developed approximately 50 hours of self-instruction on several topics.

In 1963, he worked as a Senior Analyst/Writer at the National Communicable Disease Center [Center for Disease Control] for their Training Branch. There, he produced approximately 50 hours of instruction on a variety of health topics and met his wife, Carol, a fellow Training Branch employee.

In 1964, Harless moved to Montgomery, Alabama - with Carol joining him after their marriage a year later - where he became Chief of Materials Development for the Rehabilitation Research Foundation at Draper Correctional Center in Elmore, Alabama. As part of this federal experimental project in a prison for young offenders, Harless developed 1,500 hours of instruction and produced landmark experiments in the systematic approach to behavior modification. That Spring, he presented the paper, “Making Sow’s Ears Writers into Silken Programmers,” at the National Society for Programmed Instructors (NSPI) convention in Philadelphia.

In 1966, Harless joined David Sage, Inc., in New York City as Consultant and Director of Educational Technology. During his time there Harless produced approximately 300 hours of self-instruction and worked as a consultant for companies and organizations.

In 1967, while living in the D.C. area, Joe and Carol Harless founded Harless Educational Technologists, Inc. Later renamed the Harless Performance Guild, Inc., the firm specialized in research and development of systematic methods for influencing people via work-process redesign, education, and motivation. The company’s educational consultants and learning materials developers worked with clients in government, industry, the military, and education. The company also conducted workshops in Performance Problem Solving, Job Aids, Basic Instructional Design, and Advance Instructional Design, and, through its Guild V Publications, published papers and books, learning systems, and self-instructional lessons.

Soon after the founding of his company, Harless coined the term, “front-end analysis,” in An Ounce of Analysis (Is Worth a Pound of Objectives), published in 1970, and became a tireless campaigner for a systematic, disciplined approach to developing performance interventions. The concept grew out of his observations that training, no matter how well designed and received, often didn’t “take.” The reason he said was simple: Training could not solve a non-training problem. The answer was to match the solution to the problem. He envisioned front-end analysis as a procedure that sought solutions to performance problems via the implementation of interventions produced from a rigorous analysis, design, and testing process. Harless believed that job aids, written instructions employees take to job sites and use as references when they have questions about something, were not only cheaper but often more effective than trying to store information in the trainee’s long-term memory.

The couple lived for many years in New York City and Washington D.C. while their company grew. Once they determined they could live anywhere they wanted, they decided to use their decision-making model to do a system analysis on desirable places to live. They wanted to live in a small town, but one near a larger city in the Sun Belt, and needed to be near a major airport. The couple narrowed their choices to four: the Research Triangle in North Carolina; the Palo Alto, California area; Dallas; and Atlanta. They decided on Atlanta; then drew a circle around areas that were an hour or less away from the airport and chose Newnan. They were also happy to be in close proximity to the coast, and in particular, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Harless was an active member in a number of organizations including the National Society for Programmed Instruction (which awarded him the Program of Highest Quality Award in 1965). He held numerous positions and offices in the National Society of Performance and Instruction (NSPI), later renamed ISPS (the International Society for Performance and Instruction) in the mid-1990s, and received the organization’s highest awards. He was Chairman of the NSPI National Convention and also recognized as the organization’s Outstanding Member (1968); served as Vice President (1971-72) and National President (1976-77); given the organization’s highest award, Honorary Life Member (1979); received the Outstanding Human Performance System Award for his Accomplishment-Based Curriculum Development (ABCD) system (1989), the Most Outstanding Book Award for The Eden Conspiracy: Educating for Accomplished Citizenship (1999), and the Award of Excellence (2000).

Harless was inducted into Training magazine’s Human Resources Development Hall of Fame in 1988 as only the twelfth recipient of this honor. Joe Harless is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the fields of Instructional and Performance Technology.

Joe Harless retired from active leadership of the organization in 1996, putting the capability and systems under the auspices of the Exemplary Performance company of Annapolis, Maryland, headed by Dr. Paul Elliott, a long-time associate of the Guild.

Then, he turned his attention to educational reform and community improvement much along the same lines as the concepts and designs he described in The Eden Conspiracy: Educating for Accomplished Citizenship.

Harless served as chairman of the Steering Committee that formed the Central Educational Center (CEC) - a joint venture of the Coweta County School System, West Central Technical College, and the local business community - where high school students were given the opportunity to earn high school credits and technical college credits simultaneously. The CEC broke ground on June 2, 2000, and opened on August 10, 2000. In 2004, the CEC was named one of the "30 replicable national high school reform models" by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On February 6, 2014, the State Board of the Technical College System of Georgia approved the renaming of the System's certification procedure to The Joe Harless Georgia College and Career Academy Certification process. By 2020, there were 50 replications of the CEC model.

In 2004, Joe Harless was one of a group of about twenty Coweta County citizens who formed the Commission for the Promotion of Higher Education with its goal to explore the possibilities for a university center and to move in that direction. Through a university center, universities located in other parts of the state could bring courses and programs to Newnan, use shared space, and offer opportunities that were not currently available elsewhere.

In 2005, the Newnan-Coweta Chamber of Commerce conducted a survey as part of "Vision 2020," an in-depth community visioning process. This resulted in the formation of 11 different community committees to explore all aspects of the community's quality of life, and, in 2007-2008, to the work of four "Think Tanks" with Joe Harless asked to chair the one focusing on education. Also in 2005, Harless worked with the Healthcare sub-committee which made recommendations to the Commission for Promotion of Higher Education that helped establish a Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the University of West Georgia.

Joe Harless also volunteered to coach youth teams in the Newnan area with one of them winning the Under 16 Soccer State Championship. In addition to his professional and community work, he authored 20 books of non-fiction and one novel, Black Warrior’s Curse (2005). Joe Harless died on October 4, 2012, at age 71, while vacationing on Hilton Head Island.