About the Authors
BJ Gallagher
BJ Gallagher is much like the lead character in this fable – colorful and extravagant, noisy and messy – a bird who is difficult to ignore. She is a human potential missionary who hangs out in corporations and other organizations, showing people how they can do well by doing good. Her USC doctoral studies in Social Ethics equipped her to be a professional dogooder, while her years in the business world taught her to speak the language of the bottom line.
BJ enjoyed her life in the academic nest, but after seven years on staff at USC, she decided to try her wings in the “real world” of business. She landed at The Los Angeles Times, where she spent five years as the Manager of Training and Development. In 1991, she left The Times to form her own training and consulting company, Peacock Productions.
Like all peacocks, BJ loves an audience, and is a popular workshop leader and charismatic speaker. She has managed to put on a penguin suit often enough to work with many respectable clients, including Chrysler, Kellogg, Chevron, IBM, the American Press Institute, John Deere Credit Canada, Manatt Phelps and Phillips, Farm Credit Services of America, Raytheon, US Department of Veterans Administration, among others.
BJ has written and published 30 books, including Being Buddha at Work (with Franz Metcalf) and YES Lives in the Land of NO (with Steve Ventura) – both published by Berrett-Koehler.
Contact BJ at Peacock Productions: www.peacockproductions.com
Warren H. Schmidt
In his long career, Warren Schmidt has played many roles – from minister to psychologist, from professor to city commissioner, from researcher to screen writer. He has taught others how to do Life Planning, but his own career has been shaped by a lot of unexpected opportunities – leading him from Detroit, Michigan (where he was born), to Missouri, to New York, to Massachusetts, to Ohio, to Washington, DC – and finally to settle down in the San Fernando Valley in California with his wife (Reggie) and four kids. Warren has taught at two of California’s great educational institutions: UCLA and USC.
Even when he “settled down” at UCLA, however, he didn’t stay with a single role, moving from the psychology department to the Graduate School of Management, where he ended up as dean of executive education. After twenty-two years, however, Warren finally became a mature, dependable professor of public administration at the University of Southern California (but not quite a penguin, he insists!)
Warren likes to write – particularly with someone else. He first tasted the fun of collaboration when he and Bob Tannenbaum wrote an article on “How to Choose a Leadership Pattern” for the Harvard Business Review – a management classic that has sold more than a million reprints. He has written books on teamwork with Gordon Lippitt and Paul Buchanan, monographs on managerial values with Barry Posner, and two books on Total Quality Management with Jerry Finnigan of the Xerox Corporation.
A major dimension was added to Warren’s life in 1969 when he wrote a parable about divisiveness in America titled “Is It Always Right to Be Right?” Its appearance in The Los Angeles Times led to its adaptation into an animated film. Orson Welles narrated it and it won an Academy Award in 1971.
Warren is now retired and lives in northern California.
For Videos, Assessment Tools, Workbooks, Training Materials, Workshops, Consulting, and Keynotes
Contact:
Peacock Productions
