Dr. John J. Scherer
Dr John J. Scherer, an international expert on leadership and change, is regarded as the ‘father’ of Organization Development in Poland.
Leaders from 52 nations have graduated from his Executive and Leadership Development Intensives and his latest book: Facing The Tiger: Unleashing The Human Spirit at Work is available now in English and Dutch with Polish and German editions comi/ng soon.
John is known around the world for facilitating profound individual breakthroughs and workplace-wide transformations.
John's Story
As a former Combat Officer on a US Navy Destroyer, a Lutheran Chaplain at Cornell University, a Gestalt and Family Systems Therapist, Graduate School co-creator, author, successful change consultant and innovative entrepreneur, John brings a unique perspective to his life and work.
He is the creator of hundreds of articles and online media, including The Scherer Leadership Report, and is author of Work and the Human Spirit (1993), Five Questions that Change Everything (2008) and Facing the Tiger: Unleashing the Human Spirit at Work (2020). A prodigious writer, his work has been translated into 15 languages. The Stephen Covey’s organization recently honored John as one of America’s Top 100 Thought Leaders in Personal/Leadership Development, and in 2015 the International Organization Development Network recognized him with their coveted Lifetime Achievement Award. We are fortunate to have with us one of the living experts on the deep development of leaders and the Action Research approach to facilitating change, originally developed by Dr. Kurt Lewin, born in Mogilno, Poland.
Living and working from a base in Warsaw, Poland, he is known around the world for his ability to connect with leaders and front-line staff in bringing about profound individual breakthroughs and workplace-wide transformations. A father of four ‘wonderfully grown and gifted artistic’ children, he runs, does yoga, still performs the occasional magic show, and loves to read a good spy novel.
Qualifications and Certificates
- 1972: being selected for Membership in NTL, one of only three without PhDs (with Edie Seashore and Dick Beckard being the other two. . ), and the only practicing parish pastor.
- 1973: Co-developing the LIOS MA-ABS Graduate Program in 1973, the first fully experiential graduate program in the field.
- 1978: co-creating (with Bob Crosby) The People-Performance Profile, the first computer-scored, system-wide organisation assessment embedded in a survey-guided development process that Ron Lippitt said was, ‘One of the most unique contributions to the field since Kurt Lewin's Action Research’.
- 1987: creating the Executive Development Intensive (EDI) a solo/private four-day body-mind-spirit retreat for senior leaders—and their spouses, attended now by men and women from 52 countries.
- 1990: creating The Breakthrough Series, pioneering the use of video technology to enhance a team’s effectiveness during regular staff meetings.
- 1993: writing Work and the Human Spirit, the first book title to include both those words, and which helped launch the movement named in the title.
- 2011: Being selected to ‘Change the Heart’ (what I called the OD segment) in the most complex—and successful—telecommunications Merger and Acquisition in recent Polish business history.
- 2016: delivering the first three-day module (‘What is Action Research’) in the first PhD Program in OD in China.
- 2017: developing an ‘OD Consultants Network', the first of its kind in Poland, and which now enjoys members from 12 countries.
Fields of Expertise
Executive & Leadership Development
Organization Development / Culture Change
High-Performance Team Development
Keynote Presentations
You don’t need to CHANGE yourself.
You need to COME HOME to yourself.
That Changes EVERYTHING
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