Dr. Relly Nadler: This week our guest is Dr. Bob Rosen. He is the author of Just Enough Anxiety. He is an internationally recognized psychologist, a best-selling author, researcher and a business advisor to world-class companies.
He is also the founder and CEO of Healthy Companies International. This a Washington, D.C. based research, education and consulting firm whose mission it is to honor and strengthen the qualities of wise leadership in individuals, organizations and communities around the world. HCI delivers leadership programs via the internet to companies, governments, colleges and associations around the world.
Usually the internet is a follow up and we will get Bob to talk more about that. He mentioned that he has about 400 tools that after they in person work, people can use.
Dr. Rosen teaches corporate leaders how to recognize the obstacles and leverage the opportunities for new global economy.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: We are so excited to have Bob with us. I met him about six years ago over the internet. We were introduced by a mutual friend, Marshall Goldsmith, and I know in working with Warren Bennis over the years, he’s also mentioned Bob to me on a number of occasions.
In 1991, Bob was awarded a very extensive 6-year, multi-million dollar grant from the John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation to study leadership in healthy organizations. He has worked with companies in more than 30 countries and I cannot name all of them, we would take the entire show to list all of the magnificent companies he has worked with.
Just a few that might ring a bell for you are AT&T, Allstate, Boeing, Citibank, Discovery Communications, Federated Department Stores, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Price Water House Coopers, Rolls Royce, USA Today and more.
Bob is extremely good at teaching. He is very understanding both of people and business and he helps people and organizations to recognize the obstacles and to leverage the opportunities of the global economy. In addition to his book, Just Enough Anxiety, which we are going to talk about today, Bob has written several other books, including Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Culture, and by the way this book was chosen as one of Fortune Magazines Best Business Books. Another book he has written is called, Leading People: Transforming Business from the Inside Out. That book was cited by the Wall Street Journal as one of the most recommended books in its field. Of course, The Healthy Company: Eight Strategies to Develop People, Productivity and Profits. That’s the one that Warren Bennis declared absolute a must read.
It’s so great to have Bob with us today. He has been cited in many magazines including Business Week, Fortune, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times. He has appeared on lots of networks, CNN, CNBC, PBS, CBS, NPR, Bloomberg Television. He lectures all over the world at business conferences for the top organizations in our field.
He, by the way, received his BA also, in behavioral sciences from the University of Virginia. He also has a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. I just found out today that both of us are from Philadelphia and both of us have a degree in behavioral sciences, that’s more than enough reason to like each other.
I want to introduce you to Dr. Rosen.
Dr. Bob Rosen: It’s a pleasure. I should take you around to help me do my marketing. Thank you for that… I appreciate that.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Bob, we have a series of questions. We usually like to start off general and then we’ll get more specific, especially about your book. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came into the field of leadership development given your BA is in clinical psychology similar to mine. I’m interested in how you made that bridge.
Dr. Bob Rosen: Sure. I was trained as a psychologist and a clinical psychologist and particularly a child psychologist. I was at the National Children’s Hospital and I was playing Chutes and Ladders with a little 5-year-old boy and he started beating me and I started competing with him. I said, I’ve got to get the hell out of this business.
So I went to a headhunter; I didn’t have any money at the time, and I took him out to lunch. I told him my story and he said, why don’t you do what you were trained to do but stand up. It was one of these great gifts that sort of reframed my profession and said, I had some knowledge around psychology and people and behavioral science, and I could bring it out into the world if I stepped out of the office.
That was really the start of my career. Then I started working with the business roundtable as a consultant and 100’s of large Fortune 500 companies around how they were managing and mismanaging the human side of the business. I got a call one day from the Macarthur Foundation, they had heard of some of the work that I was doing, and they made an investment to start an organization to study healthy organizations and how organizations contribute to the health and ultimately the performance of people and how that contributes to the success of those organizations.
I got into the field and it became really clear to me that if we were going to build healthy, high-performance companies, we would have to understand the psychology and the psychopathology or this dysfunction of leaders because leaders either shed light or they cast darkness or shadows on their organization and that has a huge impact on the health of people and ultimately the performance of a company. Basically that was my journey and that led to interviews with now 300 CEOs around the world.
Join us and listen to the entire interview above.
Relly
