In case you didn’t catch The New York Times May 29th article on Professor Stewart Friedman, here’s the first sentence: “Students talk about Stewart D. Friedman, a management professor at the Wharton School, with a mixture of earnest admiration, gratitude and rock star adoration.” Wow! That’s a great description of Prof. Friedman, who frequently teaches the “Total Leadership” elective class to EMBA students on the east and west coasts. The article goes on to highlight the popularity of his class, noting that many students later credit him with changing their lives.
The article describes Prof. Friedman’s primary premise that “leadership can exist in every person, whether at the top, middle or bottom of any group,” and should “not be confined to work, but extended to one’s personal life, community involvement and family life.” It describes how he guides students through classroom exercises to help them identify core values and ways to implement changes that will help them achieve those core values.
In the article, Prof. Friedman notes that students in the MBA Program for Executives often find his course particularly relevant, as they are midcareer students who often have families and children and feel the pressure to balance all areas of their lives. Professor Michael Useem, who also teaches leadership and heads Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, adds, “The reason the course is so well received is that those in their 30s and 40s have mastered many essentials – finance, accounting, strategic thinking – and they are savvy about how your private life fits and should be reconciled with your work life, as opposed to in conflict with it.”
If you want to know more about Prof. Friedman’s course and research, you are in luck because Prof. Friedman has a new book due out any day now that is based on his course. In Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, he provides a blueprint for how to perform well as a leader by achieving “four-way wins.”
Link to book on Harvard Business Publishing website: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=OAVMR4KKIS5AIAKRGWCB5VQBKE0YOISW?id=3285&referral=2340
Read the New York Times article. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/smallbusiness/29shift.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
Watch Knowledge@Wharton’s videocast interview with Stew Friedman.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1970
Hear from EMBA students on ways that they balance their academic, professional and personal lives.
http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mbaexecutive/community/workhomemba/workhomemba.cfm