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Jean-Pierre Bal

Executive Director ^[1]

Professor of Leadership and Mastery of Change

To the question of  "are leaders made or born?" Jean-Pierre's reply is: "both". The programmes and the Graduate School itself are rooted in the soil of his practice-oriented and insightful research into leader(ship) meaning-and-action.. This is partly the result of an eight years' time-span, starting in the early 1990s, and during which he chose a road less taken, where he left the beaten track, to "decipher" what being or becoming a leader is "all about" - and not about. In recent years Jean-Pierre's professional scope evolved, in line with the growth of the School, of its people. His present focus is on the leading of the School, in a tandem with the coaching and mentoring of keynote participants in the the School's masters, doctorate, rootstock, and Coryphaeus curricula.

Jean-Pierre's areas of interest are in personal change processes and life coaching,  organisational rejuvenation, history and environmental issues, and crisis leadership. Merlin, the nickname used by some of his close friends use, expresses Jean-Pierre's is wizard-like style and revolving foresight. While his most important field-oriented actions are in the domain of mastery of change, Jean-Pierre has up to this day guided executives and students of more than fifty nationalities. 

The sum of his experience and knowledge about leaders, learning, and leadership in general will be  reflected in a book "to be written and published, one day" as he once stated.  Meanwhile he continues to work on a unique personal development module for leaders, called Enguerran's Odyssey. Jean-Pierre is also engaged in a seconding career, as an artist in the visual arts, pastels painting and sculpture mainly. The  Arts and Leadership thematic, or the Art of Leadership, pervades Jean-Pierre's work. He has stated that if leadership were to be included in the classical arts, then "Leadership is the Eighth Art ". (> other statements)

Jean-Pierre shouldered organisational responsibilities at previous stages of his executive career, having been active in several "blue chip" corporations in Europe, and at various executive and functional levels. His base-education, undertaken in Belgium, the USA, and Holland, is mainly in business (BA '80, MBA '86). At the end of the 1980s Jean-Pierre started lecturing, alongside his corporate career. He then moved to France with his family, and earned a French postgraduate degree in educational and behavioural sciences (DEA '91), with a focus on adult education. He had also become the dean of an international business school in Paris. Subsequently Jean-Pierre initiated his second major transformation of his career, moving into leadership development and education. Returning to Belgium he started a training and consultancy institute and think-tank, while the major professional step in his life was still to come: the creation and founding of the Graduate School, at the turn of the 21st century. 

His mentorship of doctorate candidates is supported by a special intercollegiate co-optation award. Some years ago a panel of academic experts endorsed a joint-opinion: "the successful creation-existence of the Thierry School and its programmes is equal to - if not surpasses - any other thesis Jean-Pierre would have formulated at an earlier stage (of his career)". 

Jean-Pierre's "non-formal" education is, quite simply, in lifelong learning. The favourite quote of our school's helmsman is from Walt Disney : "If you can dream it, you can do it", a statement to which he often ads: "for better, or for worse". 

Jean-Pierre has three children, Jean-Michel, Anthony, and Nicolas, whom are sometimes nicknamed the Three Musketeers.  

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"No other set of experiences in my career has brought me such a wealth of learning and sharing as the drawing, the initiating, the growing, and the leading of the Thierry Graduate School of Leadership"

"Leading is an art, the one art that involves the six senses in the relationships with, and in the influencing of and by other people"

"We all make some errors, have some failures, and some successes in life; it all demonstrates the imperfection as well the courage of human beings, of leaders in particular "

-- Jean-Pierre Bal 

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