Marshall Goldsmith is an American executive coach and author, generally regarded as among the most influential figures in that field, whose client list has included the chief executives of some of the largest companies in the world.
He holds a doctorate from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, which honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012, and Indiana University's Kelley School named him Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010. He has been repeatedly ranked among the top leadership thinkers by Thinkers50 and similar rankings.
His method is behavioral and not psychological. He is not interested in why a leader behaves as they do and is entirely interested in what the people around them experience, which is why his signature process involves collecting feedback from colleagues, apologising, asking for suggestions, and following up relentlessly. The following up is the part he considers essential and the part most people skip.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There, published in 2007, is his best-known book and made the argument that the behaviors which produce early success frequently become the obstacles to further progress.
Triggers, written with Mark Reiter and published in 2015, addresses why knowing what to do does not ensure that you will do it. Its central practice is a list of daily questions, each phrased as whether you did your best to achieve something instead of whether you achieved it, and scored numerically each evening. Goldsmith pays somebody to telephone him and ask these questions, which he reports without embarrassment as evidence that the practice does not hold without external accountability.
He has published or edited more than thirty books and gives away a substantial amount of his material for free.
Marshall Goldsmith
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