2006 Authentic Leadership Summer Program

Plenary Presenters

Margaret Wheatley is an internationally acclaimed speaker, teacher, and writer. She has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth. For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on six continents, including large corporations, government agencies, healthcare institutions, foundations, public schools, colleges, major church denominations, the armed forces, professional associations, and monasteries. Wheatley is president of The Berkana Institute, a global leadership foundation founded in 1991. Berkana supports life-affirming leadership in more than thirty nations, through a variety of initiatives designed to support the new leadership that is emerging everywhere.

Wheatley's path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science (1992, 1999), is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations. It has been translated into eighteen languages and won many awards, including Best Management book of 1992 in Industry Week, Top Ten Business Books of the 1990s in CIO Magazine, and Top Ten Business Books of all time by Xerox Corporation. She is also the co-author of two other best-selling books, A Simpler Way (with Myron Rogers), and Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. Her newest book (2005) is Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. See also www.margaretwheatley.com.

On the evening of Monday, June 19, Margaret Wheatley will offer "A Call to Fearlessness for Gentle Leaders" to the Core Program community.

Julio Olalla is the founder of the Newfield Network. A masterful keynote speaker, master certified coach, and pioneer in the field of coaching, he has addressed large audiences throughout the world on the topics of leadership, organizational learning, education, and coaching. He has worked with over 50,000 individuals and organizations over the past 20 years, inspiring clients to review not only the content of what they are thinking and learning, but also their interpretation of learning itself.

Julio Olalla will lead a module on "Re-igniting the Joy of Leading" during the 2006 Core Program. He will also lead a plenary activity titled "Passion, Peace & Learning" on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 20.

Peter Senge is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants committed "to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences" through the mutual development of people and institutions. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a "Strategist of the Century," one of twenty-four men and women who have "had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today" (September/October 1999). His special interest is on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.

Senge is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990). This book, which provides the knowledge for organizations to transform rigid hierarchies into more fluid and responsive systems, is widely credited with creating a revolution in the business world. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold, and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. His most recent book, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (SoL 2004), co-authored with C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, documents the authors' development of a new theory about change and learning.

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 22, Peter Senge, Hunter Lovins and others will lead a plenary event that joins global themes with local action.

Hunter Lovins is the president and founder of Natural Capitalism, Inc. and co-creator of the Natural Capitalism concept. In 1982 she co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute and led that organization as its CEO for Strategy until 2002. Under her leadership, RMI grew into an internationally recognized research center, widely celebrated for its innovative thinking in energy and resource issues. By the time Hunter left, the institute had grown to a staff of 50 people and a $7 million annual budget, half of it earned through programmatic enterprise.

In 2001, Hunter was named one of four people from North America to serve as a delegate to the United Nations Prep Conference for Europe and North America for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. She served as a Commissioner in the State of the World Forum's Commission on Globalization, co-chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jane Goodall.

Lovins has co-authored nine books and dozens of papers, and was featured in the award-winning film, Lovins On the Soft Path. Her latest book, Natural Capitalism, co-authored with Amory Lovins and business author Paul Hawken, was released in September 1999.

Hunter has addressed such audiences as the U.S. Congress, The World Economic Forum at Davos, the World's Fair Energy Symposia, the Industrial Designers Society's WorlDesign, the Epiphany service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the State of the World Forum, Bioneers, the Global Economic Forum, the World Watch State of the World Conference and hundreds of conferences and college symposia.

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 22, Hunter Lovins, Peter Senge and others will lead a plenary event that joins global themes with local action.

Back to the 2006 Summer Program page.