The Sweeney Agency

About Jim Kouzes - Business Leadership Speaker:

Jim Kouzes is the co-author with Barry Posner of the award-winning and best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, with over 1.4 million copies sold. He's also an executive fellow, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.

The third edition of The Leadership Challenge, released in the fall of 2002, debuted as number 4 on the BusinessWeek best-seller list, the only 3rd edition of any book ever to make that list. The book was the winner of the 1989 James A. Hamilton Hospital Administrators' Book, the 1995-96 Critics' Choice Award, and was a BusinessWeek bestseller for three years. Their newest book, A Leader’s Legacy, was released in September 2006, and was selected by Soundview Executive Book Summaries as one of the top thirty books of the year.

Jim and Barry developed the widely used and highly acclaimed Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), a 360° questionnaire assessing leadership behavior. The LPI has been administered to over 250,000 leaders, and over one million observers have provided feedback using the LPI. Over 300 doctoral dissertations and academic research projects have been based on their work.

The International Management Council (IMC) honored Jim and Barry as the 2001 recipients of the prestigious Wilbur M. McFeely Award for their outstanding contributions to management and leadership education.

Not only is Jim a highly regarded leadership scholar and experienced executive, The Wall Street Journal has cited Jim as one of the twelve best executive educators in the U.S. In 2006 Jim was presented with the Golden Gavel, the highest honor awarded by Toastmasters International. A popular speaker, some of Jim’s clients have included: AT&T, Bank of America, Boeing, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Consumers Energy, Dell Computer, Deloitte Touche, Egon Zehnder International, Federal Express, Honeywell, HSBC, Ingersoll Rand, and Johnson & Johnson.

What Jim Kouzes Talks About:

The Leadership Challenge
In today's world there are countless opportunities to make a difference. And more than ever there is a need for people of all ages, from all backgrounds, with all types of life experience to seize those opportunities that lead to greatness. More than ever there is a need for leaders to inspire us to dream, to participate, and to persevere. The Leadership Challenge offers everyone the chance to do just that – to take the initiative and make a difference.

The Leadership Challenge is about how leaders mobilize others to want to get extraordinary things done. It's about the practices leaders use to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. It's about a climate in which people turn challenging opportunities into remarkable successes.

Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who chose to follow. Sometimes the relationship is one-to-many. Sometimes it's one-to-one. But regardless of whether the number is one or one thousand, leadership is a relationship. It's nonsense to assume that leadership is genetic. There's no hard evidence to support that assumption, and worse, it dooms every one of us to accept our limitations as our destiny.

The truth is that leadership is an observable set of skills and abilities that is useful whether one is in the executive suite or on the front line, on Wall Street or Main Street. And any skill can be strengthened, honed, and enhanced if we have the motivation and desire, the practice and feedback, the role models and coaching, and the support and recognition.