Alain Gauthier (USA / France)

Alain Gauthier's consulting, managing and teaching experience is concentrated in the areas of strategic management, organization and policy design, as well as leadership and team development. A graduate from H.E.C. (Paris) and an M.B.A. from Stanford University, he has served over the past 35 years a large variety of client organizations in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada and the United States. He first worked as an associate of McKinsey & Company in Europe, then as a partner of a Paris-based consulting firm, and is currently Executive Director of Core Leadership Development in Oakland, CA.

His clients have ranged from some large European and American corporations such as Aerospatiale-Matra, CarnaudMetalbox, Groupe Schneider, Hewlett-Packard, Penton Media and Shell to medium-size industrial companies and service firms, several large international consulting firms, a number of healthcare and educational institutions, as well as young presidents organizations. Prior to his move to California in early 1986, he was general manager of an international publishing firm, while developing and teaching business policy courses at the Lyons Graduate School of Business in France.

Over the last fifteen years, Alain Gauthier has focused his consulting and facilitating work on new approaches to collaborative leadership development and organizational learning issues, such as how to:

• clarify, share and enrich a company's purpose and vision as a prerequisite for more innovative strategies, effective teamwork and stronger individual commitment;
• build or reinforce new values in an organization, while acknowledging differences in individual value systems;
• arrive at a shared understanding of current reality as a basis for redesigning structures and systems to channel individual energies toward inspired organizational performance;
• help develop creative and inspiring leadership at all levels, providing the atmosphere for accelerated individual growth and team learning.

To this end, Alain conducts two major types of seminars in North America and Europe: public leadership development courses and in-house executive team-building sessions around shared visions and values. In both cases, the approach calls for a preliminary clarification of one's personal vision and for an awareness of the individual and collective structures that limit one's creative potential; it also combines intuitive processes with systems thinking, personal dynamics and dialogue in building visions and understanding reality. Alain has co-designed the learning laboratory Mastering the transition to Capitation to help accelerate learning in healthcare organizations. His most recent program Developing Collaborative Leadership enables professionals from diverse fields to achieve synergy as a learning team in turbulent times. He also delivers presentations and keynote addresses on organizational learning in North America and Europe, and is an active member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), the former MIT Organizational Learning Center. He is a founder, key facilitator and Chair of the Development Committee of SoL France, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Global SoL Network. Alain is also a trustee of Pathways to Peace, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to peace-building activities.

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 its two sequels: "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" and The Dance of Change - The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations". He contributed to "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" and is a co-author of "Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow's Workplace", published in 1995. Alain has designed and taught courses at John F. Kennedy University for their Organizational Leadership Program and is a visiting professor at the MIB Program of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris.