Center for Leadership
Studies

Fascinated by the behavior of humans and businesses in transition, Daryl Conner has dedicated his career to helping organizations find greater human resilience as they approach major change.

“At the heart of organizations there is the drive to help people when they’re transforming, and I’ve always been interested in how our species handles those shifts—this applies at a micro level to changes in a family and at a macro level to change in countries,” he explains.

With more than 35 years of research and development in organizational consulting, Conner is a natural fit for the Center for Leadership Studies. He advises senior executives in Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and nonprofit institutions across the globe, and has also authored two books—Managing at the Speed of Change (Random House, 1993) and Leading at the Edge of Chaos (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), and posts regularly to his blog, Change Thinking.

As a faculty member at the Center for Leadership Studies Conner helps candidates reckon with the human side of organizations’ rapid cycle of change, guiding them into how to navigate and utilize change to gain a competitive advantage. Calling upon his experience as a change management consultant, Conner presents MAOL candidates with patterns of successful and unsuccessful businesses in implementing structural shifts. The opportunity for growth, he explains, and the beauty of the MAOL program comes in leaving it to the candidates to discover how to replicate these patterns of success in the context of their own initiatives.

“The program’s processes are non-linear,” Conner says. “We don’t give candidates 16 things to memorize and then apply. Instead, they’re inundated with a wide variety of perspectives—physical, philosophical, and spiritual. It’s then their job to look into what they know and pull what is needed to make their project succeed.”

Throughout his involvement with the MAOL, Conner has watched candidates transform themselves as well as their organizations.

“Students bring a really substantial ROI back to the company, but how much they shift personally and evolve as individuals, not just as executives, is extraordinary,” Conner notes. “Across the board, candidates have a high tolerance for ambiguity and a great ability to embrace diversity of thinking. They have a low tolerance for pat answers and a predisposition for creative answers to problems.”

Conner cites MAOL’s emphasis on personal growth and how it links to and has a positive impact on the organization as the program’s key to success.

Conner engages his extensive consulting experience, sustained research, a master’s degree in psychology and a deep spiritual focus as Chairman of Conner Partners, an Atlanta-based strategy execution firm. He works with global organizations and has been researching change and strategy execution since 1974. Conner has penned more than 250 published works on change and strategy execution and is a prolific speaker on the subject.