Learning is what you do for yourself: What I learned as a student and then as a co-teacher with professor André Delbecq

Abstract

ABSTRACT I was working full-time while grinding slowly through Santa Clara’s night-school MBA program when I took Andre Delbecq’s course in Spirituality of Organizational Leadership. By this point in my career, I had run the North America operations of Autodesk, a $200M business and had launched the first web server and the first web authoring software. But I had also been fired from two major jobs and was struggling with what defined “success”. Our communication continued beyond the immediate course and even beyond graduation. Dr Delbecq invited me as a guest speaker in a later class, and eventually, I co-taught numerous courses with him. In this article, I describe my experience of Dr Delbecq’s unusual agency-oriented approach, as well as his reflections on my own management vision. I then describe how the lessons I learned while working with Dr Delbecq have guided my subsequent efforts to make work more human-centered.