"One of the top 100 management and leadership blogs that all managers should bookmark." — HR World
"A business consultant, executive coach, author-lecturer, blogger, songwriter, ex-rock & roller, former US Presidential candidate? Who the #@&%* is this dude? — Bic Sheaffer
"I wish I knew." — John O’Leary
"I've interviewed many people, some serious, some comic, people with different points of view. Without a doubt John O'Leary is one of them." — Alan Colmes
Background: I cut short a promising academic career in the later 1960s to jump into the world of pop music. Rather than hang with slackers on campus who I knew wouldn’t amount to anything (ne’er-do-wells like George Bush, John Kerry, and Howard Dean) I left New Haven with my folk-rock band, the Morning, and in the Summer of Love headed to New York where my band opened for Frank Zappa, Al Kooper, the Grateful Dead, and Sly and the Family Stone—all great Americans—before moving onto LA and even wilder times.
In the early 1980s (oh, did I skip a few years?) I moved onto the next obvious career, business consulting. (There was a sequential logic to that—I just can’t remember it.) After studying at the feet of the Masters—including Peter Senge, Fernando Flores, Werner Erhard, and most recently Tom Peters—and working with over a thousand organizational leaders and hundreds of successful business teams in the last 25 years, I’m now bringing together my two careers in my book-in-the-making, "Business Lessons From Rock." This is also the subject of talks and seminars I'll be doing in the coming years.