Emeritus at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he also served as department chair and interim dean. He holds a BA in history and a PhD in organizational behavior from Yale University.
He has written numerous books on leadership and organizations with coauthor Terry Deal, including Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership (7th ed., 2021); Reframing the Path to School Leadership: A Guide for Principals and Teachers (3rd ed., 2018); How Great Leaders Think (2014); Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit (3rd ed., 2001); The Wizard and the Warrior: Leading with Passion and Power (2006); Escape from Cluelessness: A Guide for the Organizationally Challenged (2000); Becoming a Teacher Leader (1994); and Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations (1984). His books have been translated into more than 10 languages; and his publications also include numerous cases, chapters, and articles in scholarly and professional journals.
Bolman consults and lectures worldwide to corporations, public agencies, universities, and schools. Prior to his position at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, he taught at Carnegie Mellon and then for more than 20 years at Harvard, where he also served as director and principal investigator for the National Center for Educational Leadership and for the Harvard School Leadership Academy and as educational chair for two Harvard executive programs – the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) and the Management Development Program (MDP) – and as co‐founder of MDP.
In 2003, Bolman received the David L. Bradford Outstanding Educator Award from the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society for his lifetime contributions to teaching and learning in the organizational sciences.
Joan V. Gallos is Professor of Leadership Emerita at the former Wheelock College, where she also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs. She holds a bachelor's degree cum laude in English from Princeton University and master's and doctoral degrees in organizational behavior and professional education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Prior to Wheelock, Gallos was tenured Professor of Leadership, University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Executive MBA Program at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she had also served as Dean of Education, Director of the Higher Education Graduate Programs, Coordinator of University Accreditation, and Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Strategic Planning. Gallos has also held academic appointments at the Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard Graduate School of Education, University of Massachusetts–Boston, and Babson College; and has taught in executive programs at a wide variety of institutions around the world.
Gallos has published widely on issues of professional effectiveness, organizational change, and leadership development. She is the editor of Organization Development (2006) and of Business Leadership (2nd ed., 2008); coauthor with V. Jean Ramsey of Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart (1997); creator of a wide variety of published management education teaching and training materials, including the instructional guides for the Jossey‐Bass Reader series in management and for the seven editions of Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership; and author of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly and professional journals. She is also the former editor of the Journal of Management Education.
Gallos lectures and consults in the United States and abroad on leadership and organization development. She has served as a Salzburg Seminar Fellow; as president of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society; on a large number of national and regional advisory boards, such as the Forum for Early Childhood Organization and Leadership Development, the Kauffman and Danforth Foundations’ Superintendents Leadership Forum, the national steering committee for the New Models of Management Education project (a joint effort of the Graduate Management Admissions Council and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation College Age Youth Leadership Review Team; and on civic and nonprofit boards, including the Friends of Chamber Music, the New Repertory Theater, and as a founding board member for Actors Theater of Kansas City and for the Kansas City Library Foundation.
Gallos has received numerous awards for her writing, teaching, and professional service, including both the Sage of the Society and the Distinguished Service awards from the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society; the Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award for the best article on management education (and finalist for the same prize in subsequent years); and the Radcliffe College/Harvard University Excellence in Teaching award. She also served as founding director of the Truman Center for the Healing Arts, based in Kansas City's public teaching hospital, which received the 2004 Kansas City Business Committee for the Arts Partnership Award as the best partnership between a large organization and the arts.
Joan Gallos and Lee Bolman have worked together for more than 40 years on a variety of teaching, training, and consulting projects for universities, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. In addition to the first edition of this book, they are co‐authors of Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work.
Part I Leadership Epistemology: When You Understand, You Know What to Do
The three chapters in Part I develop a central theme in the book: thinking and learning are at the heart of effective academic leadership. Colleges and universities are complex institutions that put a premium on sensemaking: the ability to decode messy and cryptic events and circumstances. One source of that complexity is the reality that academic institutions are inhabited by people and are designed to foster human creativity and development, which means that all the mysteries of the psyche, human groups, learning, personal and professional growth, and human relationships are central to the everyday work of academic administrators. Effectiveness in such a world requires both self‐knowledge and intellectual tools that enable leaders to understand and decipher the ambiguous situations they regularly face in order to make sensible choices about what to do.
Chapter 1, “A Tale of Two Presidents: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Leadership,” opens with stories of two prominent university presidents whose careers ended very differently, before digging into the institutional characteristics that make academic leadership unique, rewarding, and tough. It previews many of the central ideas and issues that will be developed in later chapters. Chapter 2, “Sensemaking and the Power of Reframing,” examines everyday epistemology: how leaders come to know and understand their world and work; and how their humanity can limit or enhance their choices, tactics, and strategies. Chapter 3, “Knowing What You're Doing: Learning, Authenticity, and Theories for Action,” extends the discussion of sensemaking to the issue of learning from experience and from relationships with others. Leaders can never prepare for all that they may face. Strong capacities for ongoing learning and self‐reflection are indispensable.
1 A Tale of Two Presidents: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Leadership
After 13 years as president of Spelman College, Beverly Tatum retired in 2015 amid widespread praise from constituents who credited her for leaving Spelman much stronger than she had found it (Watson, 2014; McAllister‐Grande, 2015). One of her contemporaries, Lou Anna Simon, served almost 15 years1 as president of Michigan State University but resigned in much less happy circumstances, pushed out in 2018 in the wake of a devastating scandal around a serial sexual abuser. Simon and Tatum were both talented, high achievers, but the stark differences in their presidential denouements are emblematic tales containing vital lessons for contemporary academic leaders.
Tatum
