Barry Jentz
For 35 years, Barry has consulted to professional firms, educational organizations, and companies on leadership development and team building, taught about “Leadership and Communication” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and written books about his work. In addition to the books presented on the L&L Inc. website, he co-authored Success in the New Job, with Dr. William Ronco, for the American Management Association. He has published numerous articles about his EntryPlan approach to starting a job successfully, recently with Jerome Murphy, “Starting Confused,” in the June 2005 Phi Delta Kappan. Barry’s latest work on leadership appeared in the January 2005 Phi Delta Kappan, “Embracing Confusion,” co-authored with Jerome Murphy.

Talk Sense is the product of Barry’s life long experience with confusion, as a young, leader-type who often found himself shamefully confused, and then as an organizational consultant who found to his surprise that other people in leadership positions were confused, too, at least behind the closed doors of one-to-one coaching sessions. Drawing on thirty-five years of meeting in coaching relationships with leaders in both public and private organizations, he captures the dramatic process of transforming the unavoidable condition of confusion from a liability to a resource for exercising leadership for change. Barry shows the transformative process in the dialogue exchanges that take place between clients and him, as well as in dialogue between his clients and others.

About Leadership And Learning:

Since 1975, Barry Jentz and Joan Wofford have been Partners and Principals in Leadership and Learning Inc., an organizational development and consulting firm specializing in leadership development and organizational change. Between us, we have over seventy years of experience, working extensively in both the public and private sectors with administrators, managers, and executives in hospitals, government and social service agencies, day care facilities, and higher education, as well as in businesses as diverse as newspaper publishing, finance, nuclear power, architectural design and construction, real estate development, international management consulting, engineering, consumer products, .com start ups, software development, and magazine publishing, along with doctors and lawyers.

Our business is making learning an integral part of leadership: We believe that leaders must be capable of learning about and modifying their own practice by examining the underlying patterns of thought that give rise to that practice, as well as generate this same capability in those who work for them. Our methodologies engage leaders in examining and changing their own behavior and underlying mental constructions by:

Creating new personal and interpersonal knowledge through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Helping individual leaders make new sense of their experience and increase their vocabulary of leadership behavior through Executive Coaching

Construing the start of a new job as an opportunity for organizational learning by using an Entry Plan Approach

Producing change in individual and teamwork performance through a progression of Group Teamwork Performance Feedback Activities

Expanding interpersonal skills through Video Taping and Analysis of a Progression of Difficult, Managerial Interactions

Enhancing the performance of large teams through an Offsite All-On-The-Same-Page Activity and other designs to help groups identify, examine, change, and improve their own work structures and processes