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The Greenland case describes the experience of four young Norwegian men determined to set a world record for unsupported crossing of Greenland. The case describes the team, their preparations, and their experiences as they crossed in “good” weather that was often whiteout blizzard conditions with temperatures dropping as low as −78 degrees F. Throughout the case, one of the team members reflects on things he learned about himself, about the team, and about leadership from the experience (recorded in italics). The teaching note (available to registered faculty) is supplemented by a PowerPoint presentation that helps introduce the expedition to Greenland, other “risky recreation,” and the concepts related to resonance or flow. A video supplement is also available. The case lends itself to a profound discussion of leadership on its own and leads in nicely to a discussion of world-class performance and the purpose of life, which both startles and pleasantly surprises most students and participants.

Whoosh, is that all there is? On the eve of becoming a partner at a well-known consulting firm (“the stuff MBA dreams are made of”), a senior executive starts to question what he is doing with his life. Walt Shill had graduated eight years earlier from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and had worked his way up at McKinsey Consulting to become the first American partner in the Japanese office. Shill and his family move back to the United States, where he starts to question his goals. For the first time, it seems that Shill has no target to aim for. Having had reached his goals, Shill sets out on an adventure to seek his own meaning of life. He gets into good-enough shape to take a cross-country bicycle ride, which he completes. This undisguised case tells Shill's story and what he learned along the way. It ends with Shill's promise to himself to be less judgmental and to start walking through life with eyes wide open. A teaching note is available to registered faculty.

There appears to be a recruitment process in which recruits tend to look at people much like themselves, proceed with an uncertain feel for what defines a desirable candidate (while emphasising considerations of personal style over indicators of analytical‐technical competence), and concentrate efforts among those who have received a prestigious degree. Analysis of one American business school's recruiting procedures produces evidence that simply by being admitted to this school students ensure themselves of the opportunity to be considered for “fast track” positions in the corporate world, and, once entered into the contest, compete among themselves on the basis of their ability to convey a personal style in line with prevailing norns of “executive” behaviour at particular companies.

This article describes one way for committee chairs, program administrators, and/or task force leaders to effectively galvanize an educational program change process. In particular, it introduces and describes the successful use of an assumptions audit (AA) to expose, challenge, reinforce, and/or discard a variety of educational program design and delivery assumptions under‐girding one top‐ranked, MBA program's required first year.

From a case study perspective, this paper chronicles the actual process pursued by a faculty committee chair, to successfully and effectively initiate an educational program review and change process. The paper also roots the AA in the literature on creativity, teams, educational administration, and organizational development.

As a result of the insights provided by the AA, a successful educational change process was launched with high collegiality amongst the change team and with high clarity regarding avenues of change to pursue and not to pursue, all of which led to much less angst, debate, and elapsed time in bringing about an agreed – on set of program changes.

Others seeking to productively, expeditiously, and collegially embark on an educational change process should find the AA idea and process useful.

The reasons for, the steps followed, and the results of a novel assumptions audit (AA) are presented. The AA process is described in sufficient detail that others can easily undertake their own version.

To provide and describe an inventory or practices executive education (EE) instructors can use to facilitate the transfer of program participants' learning back to their workplace.

A number of experienced EE instructor team leaders, from one highly‐ranked business school EE provider, met to share and discuss the mechanisms they use in their EE programs to facilitate the transfer of program participants' learning back to their workplace. This paper presents an overview of each of those mechanisms.

About 30 mechanisms for facilitating the transfer of EE program participants' learning back to their workplace are discussed along with an organizing framework intended to focus EE program instructors' attention on the key protagonists and the timing of the facilitating mechanisms.

This paper provides a number of very specific, readily implementable things EE program instructors can do to facilitate the transfer of program participants' learning back to their workplace.

Prior literature has documented: the challenge of EE program participants transferring their program learning back to the workplace, identified barriers to the transfer, and even reported on executives' views regarding generalized ways that might be helpful for this transfer to occur. This paper complements this literature by exploring what one top‐ranked EE institution's program instructors actually do in this regard, all in the context of pertinent adult‐learning concepts.

Presents mentoring as a valuable social development phenomenon that has endured historical paradigm shifts and will survive the present transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Views mentoring as one of several types of developmental relationships that will be important to people in the new age. Raises questions about how mentoring might be shaped by the operating realities of the new paradigm and offers some preliminary suggestions.

The purpose of this paper is to show that “common sense” is rooted in genetic and memetic legacies developed early in life and is not so common based on where those legacies were developed. To show that managers who are unable to review and adjust their common sense are not likely to be effective managers locally or globally.

The logic developed here is based on eclectic literature sources in psychology, anthropology, and management and from personal consulting activities all over the globe. The logic converges on the border between common and uncommon “sense” and reports data from sessions held in every quarter of the globe.

This discussion finds that much of management behavior is based on “common sense” that is neither accurate nor effective. For example, managers who focus on visible professional behavior and results at the expense of feel, which is common sense to most, may find their results to be, ironically, less than they could be.

Managers can learn to be more self aware particularly at “Level Three,” to understand better the bases for their own behavior and that of others and let go of commonly held non‐sensical assumptions about the way the business world operates. If they can, and the data suggests that most cannot, do this, they have a chance to develop a world‐class performing organization operating on a new and more functional “common sense.”

While many of the individual concepts and sources are not new, the convergence of logic on the importance of distinguishing between visible behavior, conscious thought and underlying values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations about the way the world is or should be and how those elements affect behavior is not widely nor commonly held “sense.” Hence, the links drawn in this discussion will likely be counter‐intuitive to the vast majority of managers. Examples of companies of all sizes who understand are introduced to ground the case made here.

This paper introduces readers to the usefulness of, design of, and an example of a custom executive education program charter. As such, charters are posed as a key task to complete at the outset of a new custom executive education provider/client relationship.

This paper codifies the attributes of a well-conceived and well-crafted program charter based on a number of years of having led custom executive education program design, development, and delivery activities.

Six components of a useful and substantive custom executive education program charter are identified. Each is discussed as are the roles that a completed charter can contribute to in an ongoing custom executive education provider/client relationship.

The field-inspired custom executive education program charter insights presented are immediately actionable by program providers and/or the client sponsors of such programs.

Readers are provided with a template for crafting their own charters. The merits of having a charter are highlighted, as are some of the challenges involved in crafting one.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and define the concepts of “energy” and “feel” into understanding organizational spiritual leadership. It does so through the following. First, it offers a view of workplace spirituality by defining the role of organizational spiritual leadership. Second, it introduces the metaphors of “made” as well as “found” organizational worlds, reflecting a constructivist and positivist perspective, respectively, and highlight their relevance to organizational spirituality. Third, it adapts David Kolb's experiential learning model to articulate an experiential learning model for navigating feel in both “made” and “found” worlds. Finally, it derives implications for leadership and organizational development research and practice in the context of workplace spirituality moving forward.

This is a conceptual paper. It explores the ideas of “feel,” “energy,” and “inspiration” in the context of organizational spirituality. It also articulates an experiential learning model for navigating feel by taking into considering the constructivist and positivistic ontological perspectives embodied in the metaphors “made” and “found.”

This conceptual paper invites a re-consideration of commonly understood concepts such as motivation, and performance in the context of organizational spirituality.

This paper includes telling implications for leaders seeking to understand the increasingly important concept of workplace spirituality. It invites them to seek to better understand why and how organizational spirituality matters to themselves and the people they lead. It prompts them to reconsider the value of important organizational constructs and their continued relevance in a rapidly changing workplace.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this paper introduces an original conceptual experiential learning model for navigating “feel” in both “made” and “found” organizational worlds in the study of organizational spirituality.

The purpose of this paper is to provoke academic and practitioner thinking by asserting a set of leadership principles first in oneself and then in others.

The paper asserts a set of leadership principles, including a new definition of leadership, namely to manage energy. First, most managers seem to use more traditional definitions, like getting people to focus on a common goal, and, second, to focus on others at the expense of recognizing how their own energy level affects those around them.

Leaders and managers should first reflect on leading themselves and their own energy, while paying more attention to real buy‐in rather than superficial buy‐in. Moreover, leader/managers should pay more attention to the degree to which they live “outside‐in” and therefore behave less “leader‐like” on the inside. Leader/managers can begin to use “level three” techniques rather than the more superficial “level one” (visible behavior) and “level two” (conscious thought) techniques. In this way, managers change the way they think about managing themselves.

This paper builds on, and adds to, the work of Ed Schein, Albert Ellis, William Glasser, Tony Damasio, and others. The originality lies in the collection and integration of concepts raised by these writers, and others.