Integral Leadership Council Member

Integral Leadership Council

Alain Gauthier

Alain Gautier

Alain Gautier

Alain Gauthier’s current focus as a consultant, facilitator, educator, and coach is on partnership and executive team development as a prerequisite for cultivating deep and lasting change in and across organizations. A graduate from H.E.C. (Paris) and an M.B.A. from Stanford University, he has served over the past 40 years a large variety of client organizations in Europe, Japan and North America. He first worked as a senior associate of McKinsey & Company in Europe, then as a partner of a Paris-based consulting firm, and is currently Executive Director of Core Leadership Development in Oakland, CA. Over the years, he has broadened his experience from strategic management and organizational design to leadership, partnership, team and network development. Prior to his move from France to California in early 1986, he was general manager of an international publishing firm, while developing and teaching business policy courses, and conducting research on leadership and cultural change at the Lyons School of Management.

His clients have ranged from large international corporations such as CarnaudMetalbox, EADS, Hewlett-Packard, Nissan, and Shell to a number of not-for profit healthcare and educational institutions, Euronext, several large global consulting firms, medium-size industrial companies and service firms, as well as two young presidents organizations. In 2003-2004 he was actively engaged in the development of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), in partnership with several UN Agencies. In particular, he designed and co-led for GAIN several partnering and co-leadership capacity-building workshops for teams representing the

public, business and civil society sectors of more than twenty countries from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. His work in this domain continues in East Africa, in partnership with UNICEF and other international development agencies. He contributed to the development of The Partnering Toolbook with GAIN and the International Business Leaders Forum.

Over the last twenty years, Alain Gauthier has concentrated his consulting, facilitating, educational, and coaching work on new approaches to collaborative leadership development and organizational learning issues, such as how to:

  • clarify, share and enrich an organization’s purpose, values, and vision as a prerequisite for more innovative and sustainable strategies, effective teamwork and stronger individual involvement;
  • build or reinforce people’s commitment to their work and organization, while acknowledging individual differences and approaches;
  • arrive at a systemic understanding of current reality as a basis for challenging prevailing mental models, and redesigning structures and systems to channel individual energies toward inspired organizational performance;
  • help develop creative leadership at all levels that enable accelerated individual growth, team learning, and generative dialogue;
  • adopt a developmental perspective in growing an organization’s human capital, starting with senior executives and using state-of-the-art instruments to assess individual and organizational levels of development.

To this end, Alain conducts two major types of seminars in North America and Europe: public leadership development courses and in-house executive team building sessions around shared visions and values, as well as mental models and systems thinking. In both cases, the approach calls for a preliminary clarification of one’s desired contribution and for an understanding of the individual and collective structures that limit people’s creative potential; it also combines systems thinking, personal dynamics and dialogue in building a shared vision of sustainable success, assessing reality, and committing to a few key priorities and ground rules. Alain has brought in approaches to complexity and living systems in two recently developed programs: Building Sustainable Partnerships and Rediscovering Organizational Vitality.

Alain delivers presentations and keynote addresses on organizational learning, systems thinking and leadership development in North America and Europe. He is a co-founder and member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), the former MIT Organizational Learning Center, and an active participant of the SoL Sustainability Consortium. He is also a founder and facilitator of SoL France and Bay Area SoL, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Global SoL Network. Alain is a Steward of Spirit in Business and a trustee of Pathways to Peace. Alain has supervised and prefaced the French adaptation of Peter Senge’s highly acclaimed book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization, as well as two of its sequels: The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance of Change – The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. He contributed to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and is a co-author of three books: Leadership is Global: Co-creating a More Humane and Sustainable World, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transformative Leadership, and Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace. Alain has designed and taught courses at John F. Kennedy University for their Organizational Leadership Program and is a visiting professor for the International MBA Program at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. He devotes more than half of his time to work outside the United States.

Alain Gauthier Tel. 1 510 530-5500 Fax 1 510 530-5510
Core Leadership Development
alain@coreleadership.com
http://www.coreleadership.com
French cell phone: + 33 6 86 10 65 28