About Me
- John O'Leary
- Background: I cut short a promising academic career in the later 1960s to jump into the world of pop music. Rather than hang with slackers on campus who I knew wouldn’t amount to anything (ne’er-do-wells like John Kerry, George Bush, and Howard Dean) I left New Haven with my folk-rock band, the Morning, and in the Summer of Love headed to New York where my band got to play with Frank Zappa, Al Kooper, the Grateful Dead, and Sly and the Family Stone—all great Americans—before moving onto LA and even wilder times. In the early 80s (oh, did I skip a few years?) I moved onto the next obvious career, business consulting. (There was a sequential logic to that—I just can’t remember it.) After studying at the feet of the Masters—including Peter Senge, Fernando Flores, Werner Erhard, and most recently Tom Peters—and working with over a thousand organizational leaders and hundreds of successful business teams in the last 25 years, I’m now bringing together my two careers in my book-in-the-making, Cool Teams! Business Lessons From Rock & Roll Bands. This is also the subject of talks and seminars I'm doing in the coming year.
Recent Clients
- Cisco Systems
- Commerce Bank
- Deloitte & Touche
- DHL
- Johnson & Johnson
- Lockheed Martin
- Schindler
- Teck Cominco
- US Army
- Wellpoint