Jo Owen is a global leadership expert, author, advisor to senior management and social entrepreneur. He is an expert advisor at The Cognitas Group.
As a social entrepreneur Jo is a founder of four national charities. He is a founder and trustee of Teach First, which recruits outstanding graduates to teach in inner city schools. He is chairman and founder of Teaching Leaders and a founder and trustee of Future Leaders, which respectively develop excellent middle and senior leaders for inner city schools. Beyond education, he is chairman and co-founder of Start Up which has helped over 250 ex-offenders into self-employment so far. His first entrepreneurial venture resulted in the creation of a business bank.
As a leadership expert, Jo is the author of How to Lead and several other best selling management books, which have been translated into a dozen languages. He has presented two TV series for Teachers TV on leadership in schools. He has written about leadership for numerous magazines and newspapers, such as the FT. He is a frequent speaker on leadership for companies and organisations such as BT, BASF, Symantec, CIPD, CMI, the BBC and many others. His latest book, Tribal Business School, was published by Wiley in 2008. He has helped design and deliver the leadership programmes for Unilever, EDS, Teach First (all graduate level) and Future Leaders (senior management level). He led a study of Anglo-French leadership styles on behalf of Oxford University, which was reported on CNN. Jo is also an advisor and coach to senior management in the financial services, consulting and voluntary sectors.
He was formerly a strategy partner at Accenture and at Gemini, building their Japan business. Before that he worked as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, where he was responsible for Daz, Flash and Zest.
Jo holds an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA from London Business School. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Royal Geographic Society and has also worked as the Design Reviewer for an earlier phase of the Make a Difference programme.
How to Lead: What You Actually Need to Do to Manage, Lead and Succeed 2nd Ed.