Bill Isaacs

William Isaacs is Founder and CEO of dialogos, a strategic dialogue and leadership development consulting firm based in Concord, MA. He co founded the Organizational Learning Center at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and taught at the Sloan School as a Senior Lecturer for over 30 years.

He is known as a leading authority on dialogue and is the author of Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together (Doubleday, 1999), which has been translated into many languages, and has been acclaimed by a variety of reviewers as the definitive guide to profound change through speaking and listening. It is also frequently cited and used as a central guide to the practice of dialogue in settings around the world.

For the past 30 years Bill has served as a leadership advisor, educator, and architect of systems transformation for CEO’s of both startup and global corporations, fund managers, development professionals, national policy and political leaders and prime ministers. He has facilitated dialogues across a wide variety of contexts including global energy executives and policy leaders, senior political leaders across South Asia, union leaders, and ministers in national cabinets. He has also designed and guided the reform and transformation of large systems in both companies and national government agencies, involving tens of thousands of leaders across multiple geographies. His focus is on raising the level of collective leadership, enabling groups of people to access their collective intelligence, and catalyzing large-scale transformative change. Isaacs has taught dialogue, the principles of identity-based leadership, and generative change to thousands of corporate executives, development professionals, and national and policy leaders around the world. His work is featured in the curriculum of many programs and courses on dialogue around the world.

His recent projects also include facilitating a dialogue with the most senior political leaders of Nepal on national energy and economic strategy, guiding a five-year strategic visioning process for South Asia with a group of regional senior officials, advising the CEO and Senior Team of a major pharmaceutical company, and advising Investors and Fund Managers on human capital due diligence and accelerated development of their portfolio companies.

Dr. Isaacs received an A.B. in policy studies from Dartmouth College, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.Phil. and D.Phil from Oxford University.