Joseph Jaworski has devoted much of his life to exploring the deeper dimensions of transformational leadership. As founder and Chairman of both Generon International and the Global Leadership Initiative, Joseph advises CEOs and senior executives in Fortune 500 companies. He specializes in the design and execution of large-scale organizational change as well as strategy formation and implementation. He is a pioneer and prominent thought leader in the discipline of ‘Strategic Foresight’, enabling leaders to deepen their capacity for tactical and strategic insight.
Joseph began his professional career as an attorney at Bracewell, a prominent international law firm, where he was a senior partner and a member of the executive committee. In 1975, he was elected as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an honor awarded to the top 1% of American litigators. In addition, he ran a successful horse-breeding operation (Circle J Enterprises) and helped found several businesses including a life insurance company and an oil refining company.
In 1980, Joseph founded the American Leadership Forum, a non-governmental organization dedicated to strengthening collaborative civic leadership in the United States. Ten years later, he joined the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies in London to head Shell’s renowned team of scenario planners. Under his leadership, the Shell team made a fundamental shift in the way the company framed and used scenarios as a tool for strategy formation. Joseph encouraged the company to use scenarios not merely to adapt to different possible futures, but to generate—to participate in bringing forth—better futures.
Joseph returned to the U.S. as a senior fellow and member of the Board of Governors of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, later co-founding the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). Jaworski is the author of the critically acclaimed international best-seller, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (2nd Edition released June 6, 2011). He is also co-author of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (Doubleday/SoL, 2005), which explores the collaborative development of a new theory of profound innovation and change.
Joseph’s most recent book, Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation, was published in January 2012. That book describes the development of the process of Generative Discovery, which enables organizations, teams and individuals to access the source from which truly profound innovation and discovery flow.
Jaworski currently resides in Wimberley, Texas. To read more about Joseph, visit his personal site.
Academy Articles by Joseph Jaworski
- Leadership – Six Essential Elements