Relax, It's Only Uncertainty

Phil has worked full time at Ashridge since 1983. He is co-director of the Action Learning for Chief Executives Programme, and co-director of the Executive Coaching Service. He is a major contributor to Ashridge's strategic management and leadership programmes. He is client director for organisations in healthcare, financial services, fmcg, publishing, and manufacturing. He teaches, consults, researches and writes in the areas of leadership, change, handling uncertainty, and top executive learning and development.

Before joining Ashridge, Phil worked in real jobs for nearly 15 years as a manager in a variety of service and transport industries, where he was involved in management and organisational development roles. After leaving university his first work was as a volunteer social worker in the Solomon Islands, West Pacific, and before he completely grew up, he spent some time as a software engineer. His degrees are in psychology and industrial psychology, and he is a Master Practitioner in NLP.

His earlier books are: A Practical Guide to Successful Interviewing - on assessment and interviewing techniques, published by McGraw Hill; Effective Meetings, published by Century Business for the Sunday Times; Making Change Work, published by Mercury Books. He has written two books on leadership: What High Performance Managers Really Do with Stuart Crainer, published by Pitman in 1993, looked at how leaders implement strategy. His fifth, The Future of Leadership, with Randall White and Stuart Crainer, published by Pitman in 1996, explored and researched the skills needed for effective future leadership in the face of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
Dr. Randall P. White is a principal in the Executive Development Group LLC, Greensboro, NC, and an adjunct professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

Randy's work in leadership development regularly takes him to Europe, South America, and Pacific-Asia. He also teaches MBA students in the Park Fellows Leadership Program and Executive MBAs at the Johnson School, Cornell University. He is a frequent speaker for a variety of industry groups, including the Conference Board of the US and Canada, the Human Resources Planning Society, the American Society for Training & Development, and the Institute for Management Studies. He maintains an affiliation with the Center for Creative Leadership, where he spent 12 years developing programs and research on leadership. His list of current consulting clients includes M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Mobil Oil, Siemens, Aetna, ABB, Osram Sylvania, Thomson, and Kennametal.

Randy is a former board member of the American Society of Training & Development and is active on program committees of the American Psychological Association and the Academy of Management. He is a new fellow in Division 13 of APA.

Randy's interest in where leaders come from, how they develop, and their eventual success is borne out in his writing. As co-author of Breaking the Glass Ceiling and The Future of Leadership, he has had a major impact on the way women are viewed as leaders and the importance of less easily measured leadership skills like dealing with uncertainty. He has written in both popular and scientific outlets on leadership. He currently has a critically acclaimed piece on different types of leadership coaching (first published in the Consulting Psychologist).

He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Leaders and Leadership and in 1997 was a Salzburg Fellow on Women's Issues. Randy holds an AB from Georgetown, an MS from Virginia Tech, and a Ph.D. from Cornell.