Dr Carol O'Connor has more than 30 years of experience in executive development, specializing in leadership, innovation, and strategic thinking. She sees her role as preparing leaders in both public and private sectors to identify strategic goals, clarify performance standards, and retain talent that supports organizational growth. An advisor to start-ups, she supports business planning and strategic awareness to enable long-term viability and commercial success. Her experience in market audit also contributes to her ability to advise, coach and consult with business leaders.
In 2015, Carol visited East Africa on behalf of London School of Economics Entrepreneurship where she taught Change Readiness to senior medical staff from three Aga Khan Foundation hospitals in support of their achieveing JCI accreditation. As part of LSE Enterprise Custom Programmes network of practitioner experts, Dr O’Connor has, most recently, taught a distance learning series for MAPFRE (Spain) covering topics of communication, negotiation, and influencing skills. Also for LSE she's taught change management and leadership to senior officials from the Government of the Republic of Indonesia, officials from the Treasury Department of the Royal Kingdom of Brunei, and to senior level civil servants from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.
She also has provided intensive training in Building High Performance teams to members of China Trustee Association and senior leaders from Jingu Rural Cooperative Bank (Inner Mongolia). She also taught change management and leadership for many years for Institute of Banking of the Bank of Malaysia. Her work in the Middle East included leadership training to young executives in Abu Dhabi for the Emirates Securities and Exchange Commission; transformational leadership to women sponsored by the Jeddah Marketing Board (Kingdom of Saudi); strategic thinking to the Institute of Public Administration (Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi). The Department of Trade and Industry (UK) sponsored Dr O'Connor's regular visits to British Councils in Bahrain, Kuwait and Dubai to present business planning and strategy for women entrepreneurs.
Secrets of Great Leaders is her eighth book with Leadership in a Week is in its fifth edition and translated into more than 15 languages. She wrote Starting a Business in support of microfinance initiatives in East Africa and is in process of developing an app to aid pricing for products and services. Her doctorate, in organizational leadership, is from the University of California, Santa Barbara where she conducted research in communication breakdown in management groups as well as decision-making effectiveness. She writes frequently for professional journals about leadership, communication, business strategy, motivation, and creating vision for the future.
"Surface symptoms - like quality problems, delivery delays, absenteeism, and low productivity - can be a starting point. Like a cough or an aching pain, these symptoms could mean bad health for the business or just a passing issue. You won't know unless you explore further. You won't be able to fix business problems unless you know the real cause."
