December 6, 2009
“Master leaders,” says Brad McRae, “aren’t afraid to take on big challenges. They set tipping-point goals — goals that achieve multiple objectives at the same time. You get what Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls ‘Rubik’s Cube moments’ –moments when everything just falls into place.”
Brad McRae knows. A former professor at Carleton and Dalhousie universities, and a former student of Rosabeth Moss Kanter at the Harvard Business School, McRae became a faculty drop-out in 1987 Since then he has been a self-employed trainer, speaker and author on negotiation, presentation skills and leadership. His new book is The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders. (Northridge Publishing, $24.99)
McRae does more than 100 presentations a year. His “anchor clients” have included ATV, the provincial government, and Michelin, for whom he presents across the US and in Mexico, as well as in Canada. He makes, I would judge, a very good living.
McRae’s Atlantic Leadership Development Institute is an excellent example of an industry that’s now booming, but remains largely invisible, namely private-sector education. For most of us, “education” means the publicly-supported system of schools and universities — but there’s now another whole system made up of private vocational schools, highly-specialized (and often very expensive) career colleges, supplementary services like tutoring centres, and in-house training programs for specific agencies and companies. McDonald’s has a Hamburger University, Clearwater has a Lobster University, and the grand old academic city of Heidelberg, Germany, boasts an institution entirely devoted to training music therapists right up to the doctoral level.
Why has education slipped out through the gates of the campus and into the workplace? Partly, I suspect, because knowledge has multiplied at such a ferocious pace that no one group of institutions can any longer stay abreast of it and partly because companies, non-profits and governments need very specific training programs immediately, and are more than happy to pay for them.
Individuals often have similar needs. As a self-employed person, I’ve taken courses in e-commerce, business management, ballroom dancing, Web programming and design, and computerized accounting. I didn’t need a broad, comprehensive program in any of these fields. I just needed quick, precise instruction in very specific subjects, and I didn’t mind paying for it.
The huge market for such services creates a huge need for textbooks and the most successful practitioners commonly provide their own texts. Brad McRae, for instance, is the author of eight books. Two of them — Practical Time Management and From Our Grandmother’s Lap: Lessons for a Lifetime — are recognizably main-stream titles, aimed at the general public.
But the other titles, particularly the last three, are text-like volumes, aimed at the people Brad trains. After years of teaching negotiating skills, he wrote a text called The Seven Strategies of Master Negotiators. To his surprise, the book interested others — and provided him with a template.
“My background is academic psychology,” he explains, “and what I really like doing is taking the best theory about a subject, and then illustrating that theory by interviews.” Having interviewed many of Canada’s top negotiators, he realized that most of them were also superior presenters and leaders which led him to The Seven Strategies of Master Presenters and then to The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders.
The leadership book — based on interviews with such icons as Romeo Dallaire, Jim Balsillie, Louise Arbour, Stephen Lewis, Annette Verschuren and Ruth Goldbloom — is especially close to his heart.
“If you go into the bookstores,” he says, “99% of the books on leadership are by Americans, about Americans. We under-acknowledge and under-celebrate and under-recognize our own Canadian leaders, and I think we pay a very high price for that, because we’re not providing ourselves and our children with Canadian role models. We need to know how people lead in our culture, which tends to be more collaborative than in the US.”
And that, he says, is very pertinent globally, because “for today’s and tomorrow’s complex problems, the leadership model is going to be more collaborative than it’s ever been before.” Canada is a complex, multicultural country in a complex multicultural world. Others need to know the things we’ve learned.
And Brad McRae is perfectly ready to teach them.
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