Foreword
A recent cover story in Business Week (Brady, 2010) makes a telling comment about the current state of coaching. It reports that CEO Jeffrey Immelt of GE, a company with an outstanding reputation for developing leaders, has just recently “launched a pilot program to bring in personal coaches for high potential talent, a practice that GE once reserved mainly for those in need of remedial work.”
It is clear to most people in modern organizations that coaching has become a mainstream human resource management practice. It was not always so. In a recent conversation with the well-known coaching consultant Marshall Goldsmith, he noted that only twenty-five years ago, the need for coaching was a sign of trouble (personal communication, April ...
