The Sweeney Agency

About Jim Kouzes - Speaker and Author on Leadership

Jim Kouzes is the coauthor with Barry Posner of the award-winning and best-selling book, TheLeadership Challenge, with over 2 million copies sold. He's also the Dean’s Executive Professor of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. He is a renowned keynote speaker on leadership and management.

The fourth edition of The Leadership Challenge was released in August 2007 and is available in twenty-two languages. In 2009 The Leadership Challenge was selected as one of the 100 best business books of all time by 800-CEO-READ, an online bookseller. It was an Amazon Editor’s Pick for one of the Best Business Books of 2007, as well as the winner of the 1995-96 Critics' Choice Award and the 1989 James A. Hamilton Hospital Administrators' Book Award.

Jim and Barry’s book book A Leader’s Legacy (2006) was selected by Soundview Executive Book Summaries as one of the top thirty books of the year and by the Globe and Mail (Canada) as one of the top ten books of 2006. Jim and Barry have coauthored over thirty other publications including Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It—chosen by Industry Week as one of the ten best management books of 1993—Encouraging the Heart (1999, 2003), The Leadership Challenge Workbook (1999, 2003), and A Leader’s Legacy (2006).

Their newest book, The Truth About Leadership, was released in August 2010. Their books are extensively researched-based, and over 500 doctoral dissertations and academic studies have been based on their original work.

Jim and Barry also developed the widely used and highly acclaimed Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), a 360-degree questionnaire assessing leadership behavior. Over 500,000 leaders and 3 million observers have completed the LPI. It is the top-selling off-the-shelf leadership assessment instrument in the world, and has been called the most reliable, up-to-date leadership instrument available today.

Not only is Jim a highly regarded leadership scholar, The Wall Street Journal cited Jim as one of the twelve best executive educators in the U.S. He is the 2010 recipient of the Thought Leadership Award from the Instructional Systems Association, listed as one of HR Magazine’s Most Influential International Thinkers, and ranked by Leadership Excellence magazine as number sixteen on its list of the Top 100 Thought Leaders. In 2006 Jim was presented with the Golden Gavel, the highest honor awarded by Toastmasters International. Jim and Barry are the recipients of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award, presented in recognition of their extensive body of work and the significant impact they have had on learning and performance in the workplace. 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. Prior recipients include: Peter Drucker, Lee Iacocca, Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard, Norman Vincent Peale, Francis Hesselbein, and Stephen Covey.

Jim is also an experienced executive. He served as president, then CEO and chairman of the Tom Peters Company from 1988-until 2000. Prior to his tenure at TPC he directed the Executive Development Center at Santa Clara University from 1981 through 1987. He also founded the Joint Center for Human Services Development at San Jose State University, which he directed from 1972 until 1980.

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.