Welcome

The idea for this blog was born out my recent book “The Map: Your Path to Effectiveness in Leadership, Life, and Legacy” with my good friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Eigel. In the book we provide guidance on how to effectively grow your leadership effectiveness. The book is based on our 20-year collective experience working together with effective and no so effective leaders. While the book provided us the space to provide examples of real growth in leaders there is as much or more examples and insights that we left out. I want the blog to reflect the wisdom that others have offered me. I have been an active lurker (oxymoron?) on some blogs and a participant in others, but none of those blogs tap into my real passion which is leadership and leadership development.

In my experience blogs take a variety of forms, from daily personal journals to occasional essays. Some are individual efforts; others are collective ventures or group blogs. Some are done anonymously or pseudonymously; others blog in their own names. Some enable readers’ comments and others don’t. Blogs by academics are a very small part of the “blogosphere”—which by now according to various estimates include over 20 million blogs, the numbers change constantly and no one really knows for sure because the attrition rate is also high. My plan is to be around a while.

While I have no idea on how to formally kick off a blog, I thought it important in this initial posting to lay down the reasons why I am doing this blog. Here are reasons both big and small: Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover writings, musings on executive coaching that are difficult, if not impossible, to find their way in academic journals.

I am first and foremost an academic organizational psychologist who over the 25 years had the opportunity of a lifetime to be associated with great leaders of companies and institutions both large and small. My academic role as a scientist/practitioner is to create a new model for executive coaching based on constructive developmental theory and to advance the theory based on the empirical data I am collecting with the executives who work with me. In my field of industrial and organizational psychology we talk a lot about being a scientist/practitioner but I have tried to live it. My overarching goal of this blog is to spark deep reflection on bridging the gap between the theory and practice of developing effective leaders. Because I want introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic thinking within my scholarly field. I want to introduce a “mutational vector” into my scholarly work.

It is very important to me that my work be usefully translatable into public conversation. If there is one lesson I have learned in a career is how useful it is to have your academic ideas challenged and pushed in the marketplace of tough, experienced, fearless executive leaders. My thinking has grown exponentially being in the crucible of capitalism; learning that client satisfaction is tricky construct in executive leadership development. More than anything I want to place to share what I have learned and to continue to learn how to be better in my coaching, teaching, and writing about leadership development.

Because I am a teacher in an academic environment I hope this blog offers the opportunity to provide my students-- in real time-- the problems executive face on a daily basis.

The truth about the extant literature on leadership development is that much of it is stale and borne out of 20th century thinking. The freshness date stamp has long expired. What challenges executives face today are qualitatively different today than they were even 10 years ago. We can label the difference globalization, exponential technologies, business intelligence, postmodernism, or whatever, but I have no doubt we have entered into new business climate full of never seen before challenges and paradoxes. I will describe those challenges here with your help. To the extent we can understand and define these emerging trends the blog will be successful.

So, there you have it, a start. I will do my best to inform, analyze the leadership mind and hopefully entertain in the way humor, tragedy and confusion brings out the best of us.