Phil Dourado

Researcher, writer, editor, blogger, author, online community builder, developer and facilitator. I specialize in leadership and in how organizations can become more client/customer focussed. I believe that in a networked world, distributed leadership, collaboration and 'Open Source Leadership' is the next stage of evolution for leadership, with leadership emerging from the community or network, Wisdom of Crowds-style and Wikinomics-style. At various stages of our lives, everybode leads. Everyone should have opportunities to carry out acts of leadership regularly, as leadership becomes decreasingly associated with individuals in senior positions in a hierarchy. I've written a paper on Open Source Leadership that explains how this works, which I will try and upload to Insightory. I've written two books on leadership, published by Capstone/John Wiley & Sons in 2005 and 2007. And I co-wrote and edited a family book called "Learning to Live With Huntington's Disease: One Family's Story", published by Jessica Kingsley Publishing in 2007. I spent seven years researching inspiring leadership and what great leaders do as a director of the London-based Inspired Leaders Network. I learnt that leadership is not what most of us think it is, needs re-defining and is mostly poorly practised. Prior to that I co-founded and ran an online site for improving customer service and customer focussed leadership (www.ecsw.com). Before that I was a journalist for ten years, writing for newspapers and magazines including The Independent, The Observer, The Observer Magazine, The Telegraph, GQ, New Scientist, New Statesman and others on subjects ranging from science, business, social trends, marketing & advertising to interviewing Charles Schultz for The Observer Magazine on the 40th anniversary of his creation of Charlie Brown and Peanuts. 1997-2000 I edited two Business-to-Business journals - Customer Service Management Journal in the US and Customer Management Journal in the UK, before becoming an online writer, editor and community builder. I founded The Leadership Hub, 'the world's online leadership community' in 2007. www.TheLeadershipHub.com . Married. Two children. Live and work in a small village in North Oxfordshire, England. Have also worked in France and the US. Hold a Masters degree in History from Cambridge University, though one thing Oxford and Cambridge MA and MSc holders rarely tell you is that once you receive your BA or BSc from those universities, all you have to do is live another five years and they send you an MA or MSc in the mail automatically. So, every Oxbridge graduate who manages to survive five years after graduating gets a Masters degree for no effort. Anachronistic and insulting to people at other universities who work for a couple of years to achieve their Masters degree. I divide my time between writing, researching, speaking, consultancy work for large organizations (pays the bills), parenting a teenager and caring for my wife, who has a longterm hereditary illness called Huntington's Disease.