I am a speaker, writer and management educator. As a reflective practitioner, I have a unique niche in the field. I spent twenty-five years working in corporations in several countries in a series of organizational “train wrecks” as the Western World began its radical transition from the industrial era to the age of knowledge and information. I extracted from my experience some highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations that promote creativity and learning. I have spent another two decades honing my thinking as a consultant and teacher. I communicate these ideas to audiences around the world in the form of creative presentations, in-depth seminars and management development programs. My articles have been published in leading business publications such as the Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, and several academic journals.



My first book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in 1995 and was reprinted in paperback in 2002. The second book, Learning from the Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons From Golf (The Free Press 2002) broke new ground in understanding what it takes to create excellence through practice. My third book, The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012), is an extraordinary integration of management thought and practice from a systems perspective. Its objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education and thus to improve their practical judgment and wisdom – to ask better questions of reality and tell more compelling stories about it. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management thought and practice that will resonate with every reader’s experience.



Specialties: Strategy, Leadership, Change...



Strategy: I am interested in the evolutionary, ecological and cognitive processes that lead to the emergence of viable strategies. Leadership is all about creating contexts for creativity - places in space and time where people and artifacts can interact easily and in a variety of ways.



Understanding Change requires a dynamic, ecological framework in contrast to the static, economic perspectives that have dominated management thought for too long.

Education

Postgraduate

1970 – 1972

MBA

University of Chicago

Experience

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2020 – Present