Alain Gauthier’s global leadership journey started when he enrolled at 21 in the M.B.A. program at Stanford University, after graduating from H.E.C. Paris with a major in business. After 18 months as a deck officer at the French Fleet Training Center, he spent seven years in three offices that McKinsey has just opened in Europe and served some of the largest French, German and Swiss companies with a focus on strategy, international management, and decentralization. He then co-founded with two partners a Paris-based consulting firm that assisted medium to large European companies and regional development agencies.

Prior to his move from France to California in early 1986, he spent five years as 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.

As Executive Director of Core Leadership Development, based in San Francisco and Paris, Alain has focused his work on leadership, partnership and team development as key vehicles for organizational learning and transformation. In his role as facilitator, coach, educator, and bridge-builder, he believes that individual and collective leadership development is a prerequisite for cultivating deep and lasting change in and across organizations. He has worked globally with approximately two hundred senior teams and groups in a wide variety of organizations: multinational corporations, global consulting firms, not-for-profit healthcare and educational institutions, medium-size industrial companies and service firms, foundations and young presidents organizations.

In the last 4 years, Alain has had an opportunity to expand his multi-stakeholder and cross-sector work, starting with the establishment of a new global foundation in the field of nutrition, and in partnership with several UN Agencies. In particular, he has designed and co-led several partnering and co-leadership capacity-building workshops for alliance teams representing the public, business and civil society sectors of more than twenty countries from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He has contributed to the development of the Partnering Toolbook, published by the International Business Leaders Forum.

Alain is Project Coordinator for the Generative Change Agent Development research initiative, which has been launched this year by the Generative Change Community. He is a co-founder and member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), SoL France and Bay Area SoL. He is also a participant of the SoL Sustainability Consortium, 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. He contributed to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and is a co-author of two books: Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transformative Leadership, and Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace. He is currently working on a forthcoming book on the inner dimension of partnering. 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 and for the Coaching Diplome Universitaire at the Paris II Sorbonne University. He devotes more than two thirds of his time to work outside the United States.

Visit Alain's website at www.coreleadership.com.