COACHINGOURSELVES - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Translations Coordinator, Marketing, Editor

Caitlin Downing is our amazing and talented polymath, our jack of all trades. She fills in all the gaps and skills that the rest of team lacks, and then learns new ones as new needs arise. Right now she is on maternity leave and probably never getting more than 1 hour of uninterrupted sleep at any one time, but will one day forget about all that and feel like it all happened so fast.

Job Titles:

• Co - Founder

I have been an academic most of my working life. After receiving my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), I worked in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways, and then received a masters and doctorate from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Boston. In 1968, I returned to McGill, where I joined what is now called the Desautels Faculty of Management. I currently hold the Cleghorn Professorship of Management Studies, having been half-time since the mid 1980s, and have been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, London Business School in the U.K., Insead in France, and H.E.C. in Montreal. I devote myself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. In 2004, I published Managers not MBAs, in 2007 Tracking Strategies, in 2013 Simply Managing, and in 2015 Rebalancing Society, the implications of which are now my central focus. I am also completing a monograph entitled Managing the Myths of Health Care. I have worked for much of the past two decades, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, Japan, and now China and Brazil, on developing new approaches to management education and development. The International Masters in Practicing Management has been running since 1996 and the International Masters for Health Leadership since 2006. Both are rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. I teach in these programs and otherwise supervise doctoral students, restricting my public speeches mostly to conveying a particular message or visiting a place I wish to see. In 2007, four of us developed CoachingOurselves.com, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition, by enabling small groups of practicing managers to develop themselves and their organizations in their own workplace. At CoachingOurselves, I work with Kara helping review and edit all the discussion guides, with Phil to help him with direction and ideas, and I've written about 17 topics myself. In recent years, I have shifted toward more general writing, including commentaries. On my 75th birthday, 2 September 2014, I began publishing a weekly TWOG (tweet2blog: @mintzberg141 to mintzberg.org/blog), as "provocative fun in a page or 2 beyond pithy pronouncements in a sentence or 2." I like to write short stories, a few of which are on this site: I hope to publish a collection of them one day. Some years ago, I published a spoof on the foibles of flying. I also collect "beaver sculptures".

Job Titles:

• Co - Founder

Jonathan Gosling is Emeritus Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter and directs or advises on several management and organization development programs. He is an activist for reform in management education, Is a visiting professor of philosophy at a major Chinese university, and directs an annual intensive workshop employing many of the methods and approaches that underpin CoachingOurselves. He is currently supporting malaria elimination initiatives in Southern Africa and is lead faculty with the Forward Institute. He is a keen sailor, racing and cruising.

Job Titles:

• Head of Product Development / Editor

Kara Johnston is responsible for the creation of the CoachingOurselves topic library and has been integral to the development of the CO social learning approach. After working for years in the field of community mental health, she was the first hiree for CoachingOurselves. Kara is inspired by Henry Mintzberg's vision of rebalancing society, the creative possibilities of dialogic learning, and bringing innovative viewpoints into organizations. When not researching and working, she keeps busy being a mother, a meditation/yoga afficianado, and an outdoors enthusiast.

Job Titles:

• Co - Founder
• President
• Co - Founder and President at CoachingOurselves, Wrote an Article on the Impact of Content - Based Group Coaching As a Leadership Development Program in Organizations!

Phil LeNir is president and co-founder of CoachingOurselves along with world renowned management thinker Henry Mintzberg. Phil adapted Henry's ideas on reflection and dialogue for management education to develop himself and his management team at the time. This worked very well and Phil is now on a mission to bring reflection and dialogue to leaders and managers around the world through peer learning. Phil LeNir has a Masters in International Management and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal. Prior to CoachingOurselves, Phil held senior management positions in software firms specializing in speech recognition. He developed a patent in speaker verification systems and was responsible for developing speech recognition systems used by millions of people. Phil has authored numerous articles on leadership and organizational development. He wrote a book on social and informal learning for management development which, much to Phil's surprise, was only published in Japanese and did well in Japan.

Job Titles:

• Marketing and Communications Director

After his studies in communications at Université de Sherbrooke, Simon worked in the advertising industry and has been a communication specialist for different clients. He sees marketing and communications as a creative tool to make businesses grow and to reach people. He was quickly charmed by CoachingOurselves' approach to management and deeply drawn by its values for social change and forward thinking. When his mind is not working on new strategies and marketing ideas, he is in a recording studio, travelling, or seeking new music.

Job Titles:

• Vice - President
• VP of Business Development

Warren Cohen is the VP of Business Development for CoachingOurselves. An engineer by trade, Warren has been involved in various management roles as well as entrepreneurial endeavors for over 20 years, including developing an environmental packaging product for high-tech applications. He has a keen interest in helping people develop, having been a coach and motivator for national sports teams, as well as a father to Olivia (4) and Alex (7), helping them develop into resourceful, resilient, and respectful young people. " If you have any questions or inquiries, don't hesitate to contact me, and I'll be happy to get back to you as soon as I can.