Anatomy of a Successful Leadership Development Program

The author had a long career as a corporate executive and was an innovator in designing unique and effective leadership development programs. He writes about the evolution of such programs in the past 30 years, and of his experience designing and leading programs in the 1990s at AT&T and Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters). He contrasts how other corporations operated their programs with his own innovations in the field. This included using high‐quality faculty from a variety of business schools, including Harvard Business School and Kellogg/Northwestern. These professors were sometimes joined by Marshall Goldsmith, the executive coaching innovator who introduced the concept of 360 degree feedback. He further notes how the programs taught the importance of balance in life in novel ways, such as through the teaching of Austrian Ski coach Horst Abraham, and the teaching of cooking skills by executive chefs. He further believes that leadership development is “contextual in nature,” and “effective because it is in a group setting.”