Rod Napier
OD PIONEER | ACADEMIC | AUTHOR
A co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate program in Organizational Consulting and Executive Coaching, Rod Napier’s dozen books and forty years of experience focus on the application of skills and strategies for leaders and managers.
Rod, a former college football and hockey player and U.S. Marine, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, after several years working in Ghana. His atypical life journey fostered fresh insights into organizational development and system change.
Napier has emphasized looking at the “dark side” of leadership. He coined the phrase, “The Seduction of the Leader”, and his writing provides striking insights about and remedies for the dangers that face organizations whose leaders are seduced by sycophantic praise, half-truths and filtered reporting.
Rod’s origination of the 360 Feedback concept allowed him to pioneer the process of executive development using feedback.
Napier was asked to help construct the first cabinet in post-Sandinista Nicaragua for the budding democracy. Later, he was asked to bring black and white South African ministers together to help build their leadership skills. A few years later, many of them would become the backbone of the Mandela Revolution Revolution.
Napier's consulting firm, The Napier Group, has worked with executives in such widely divergent universities, industries and organizations as the University of Virginia, Exxon, Merck, CBS, the Army Corp of Engineers and Outward Bound identify blind spots that keep them from surging.
