Author: Ray Williams, Psychology Today
Coaching is the second-fastest growing profession in the world, rivaled only by information technology, as I reported in a National Post article. The profession owes its success both to the personal development movement and the huge global economic restructuring since the 1980s. Competition within and among companies, flattened management structures, shrinking talent pools and ineffective leadership have all contributed to the demand for executive coaching.
Executive coaching is an outgrowth of leadership development programs. An article in The Economist concluded executive coaching had become a significant human …

Last week, an author called Barbara Ehrenreich spoke at the Royal Society of Arts, an organisation that I chair, about her latest book, Smile or Die: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America .
I profoundly disagree with her theory. As Michael Skapinker wrote in the FT yesterday , optimism built America, and without it the country will never recapture its glory. Aldous Huxley said about the place: “The thing that most impresses me about this country is its hopefulness.”
Yet there appears to be a disturbing and broader …

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.
There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and …

Barbara A. Kerr has worked in higher education as a faculty member, an administrator, a consultant, and an executive coach. As part of her consulting services, she has assisted three Washington State college boards in hiring their college presidents, and has facilitated the hiring of many other college administrators and faculty. Currently, Barbara is the principal of a Seattle-based consulting firm that provides coaching and consulting services to government, non-profits, higher education, and business organizations.
Barbara has completed a post-graduate training course as a Master Certified Executive Coach and is a …