SPN/Atlas/Sutherland Leadership Development Training--Salt Lake City, UT - 2005

The program will be conducted by Jim Ferrell, the principal author of the book, who has worked closely with Sutherland to develop a program which focuses on issues seminal to our think tanks: politics and public policy.

Leadership and Self-Deception introduces readers to an important new idea in organizational thinking. It shows how the problems that typically prevent superior performance in organizations are the result of a little-known problem called "self- deception."

According to the authors, people who are in self-deception live and work as trapped in a box. Blind to the reality around them, they undermine performance-both their own and others'. The problem is, being in the box they can't see that they undermine performance. Consequently, they don't change, and neither do their results.

The good news is that there is a solution to self-deception and the costly problems that arise from it. Leadership and Self-Deception shows what self- deception is, how people get trapped in it, how it kills organizational performance, and--most importantly-the surprising way to solve it.

Current organizational theory finds itself in the same situation that medicine faced a century and a half ago. In those days, doctors didn't understand how a single disease could lie below the surface of arange of different symptoms, and they had no conception of how germs cause disease. As a result, they could only treat symptoms. Leadership and Self-Deception shows how business, like people, can be afflicted by "disease" - in this case self-deception, the major culprit in corporate failure. The book explains how leaders can escape self-deception and put to use the skills, systems, and techniques that will bring success to themselves and their organizations.

Atlas Economic Research Foundation, State Policy Network, and the Sutherland Institute Leadership and Self Deception (Arbinger Institute)

Tuesday, May 10 – Introducing the Leadership and Self Deception “Choice” Concept
7:30 Buffet Breakfast
8:30-11:30pm “Choice” Session I. Jim Ferrell*, the principal author,
12-1 pm Lunch
1:30-5 pm “Choice” Session II
6:30 Dinner, Little America Hotel. Keynote Speaker, Richard Wirthlin, Founder WirthlinWorldwide

Wednesday, May 11 – Applying the “Choice” Seminar to Think Tank Politics
7:30 Buffet Breakfast
8:30-10:15 Political "Traps” (i.e. Politics as Usual That Get us in the Box)
10:30-12 Getting out of Political Boxes
12-1 pm Lunch
1:30-3:00 Overcoming Organizational Boxes: Running a WOWing Political Organization
3:15-5:00 A Framework for Out-of-the-Box Political Leadership
5:00 Ajourn

The “Choice” in Political Leadership
Little America Hotel, Salt Lake City
May 10 and 11, 2005