Launching The Great Wall Seminars | monthly webcast series

Great Wall Seminars - what and why?

There is so much going on in coaching and mentoring, with just about everybody boasting an ultimate technique or new knowledge. Maybe not so different from the Human Potential Movement some fifty years ago, and we know from medicine that snake oil, water pills and comforting words can actually 'help'. Most coaching techniques have some effect on some people, in particular the susceptible.

Senior managers should be reluctant to use the services of executive coaches who are not using evidence-based methods. Similarly, much of what is being called executive coaching is limited to goal setting and individual performance at a level irrelevant and even patronizing to senior managers and leaders on a fast track.

Executive coaching is not just any coaching of executives but a specialty that includes psychological coaching and group coaching. This is central to our menu of topics.

Great Wall Seminars are designed for leadership development and strategic focus:
We want to develop reflective skills for executive coaching by covering both psychology and business - one illuminates the other;
Instead of tools and intellectual property, we decided that such knowledge will be more valuable when it is shared and co-created in a community of executive coaches and mentors; The subscription must be affordable and the contents suitable across cultures.

We have chosen the Great Wall of China to symbolise our series of webinars. As a symbol a great wall has many meanings, some good and some not so good or even bad. In most companies, cultural walls are easier to live with than to remove, in fact removing a wall often does not change anything because the landscape around it remains the same. Mergers and acquisitions have this problem. The problem in business and personal life is that we can be forced outside our experience zone and then our intuition fails. Such failures by senior managers usually become visible only after a year or more.

Not all walls are so visible as the Great Wall of China! Remember the danger of losing sight: "Whoever doesn't see the wall ahead, is likely to get hurt." Sometimes we see there is a wall in front of us, but it is hidden by fog and we are forced to slow down. But walls are also needed: How can you else provide room and roof for a nation, a company or a house if there are no walls to support it? Yin needs yang to be complete and vice versa.