Guest Profile

Rodney Napier

Rod Napier wrote the book on management best practices. His dozen books and forty years of experience are all about the application of skills and strategies for leaders and managers. A co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate program in Organizational Consulting and Executive Coaching, Rod's dynamic style of "telling it like it is" has positioned him as a sought after leadership consigliere to top-tier executives who desire the hard truths necessary to improve their organizations and themselves.&8232;&8232;

This former college football and hockey player - and Marine - earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, after several years working in Ghana. His atypical life journey fostered fresh insights into organizational development and system change. Napier was asked to help construct the first cabinet in post-Sandinista Nicaragua for the budding democracy. Later, he was asked to bring black and white South African ministers together to help build their leadership skills. A few years later, many of them would become the backbone of the Mandela Revolution Revolution.

&8232;&8232;Now with over 40 years as a professor, facilitator and business advisor, Napier has the courage to look at the dark side of leadership. He believes that knowing yourself and your impact is the first responsibility of any leader. His soon-to-be-published, The Seduction of the Leader, provides striking insights about and remedies for the dangers that face organizations whose leaders are seduced by sycophantic praise, half-truths and filtered reporting. &8232;&8232;


Napier's consulting firm, The Napier Group, has helped executives in such widely divergent universities, industries and organizations as the University of Virginia, Exxon, Merck, CBS, the Army Corp of Engineers and Outward Bound identify blind spots that keep them from surging.