Dean's Seminar Series and the Center for Leadership Welcome Robert J. Thomas

Leaders learn how to lead from experience. Most companies recognize this but provide little guidance on how to mine experience for insight. How does this learning process actually happen?

The McCormick Dean’s Seminar Series and the Center for Leadership welcome Robert J. Thomas, executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance and professor of leadership at the Brandeis University International School, for a talk on leadership strategy on Wednesday, April 13 at 4 p.m. in the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center ITW Classroom.

Thomas will draw on interviews with over 150 men and women in business, government, the military and the performing arts in his talk, “Learning to Lead: The Role of Experience and Reflection.” He finds that outstanding leaders evolved a “personal learning strategy” that enables them to confront challenging situations and extract from them valuable lessons on what it takes to be an effective leader.
 
At Brandeis, Thomas also chairs the advisory panel for the Perlmutter Institute for Global Leadership. He writes, teaches and consults about leadership and transformational change.
 
His 2008 book, Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Be a Great Leader, was hailed by Harvard's Rosabeth Kanter as "a guide for aspiring leaders in all walks of life" and by Wharton's Mike Useem as "an organizational playbook for transforming managers into leaders." He has published articles on leadership and change in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek.com, the Economic Times of India, and Sloan Management Review. Bob has also been a featured speaker at dozens of corporate and NGO events, including those sponsored by BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan School, PBS, and NASA.