Phil teaches, consults, coaches, researches and writes in the areas of leadership, organisational change, handling uncertainty, top executive learning and executive team development. He coaches chief executives and top executive teams.

He was Director of Leadership Programmes at Ashridge Business School, UK, where he worked for 21 years. He was also co-director of the Action Learning for Chief Executives Programme, and the Executive Coaching Service. Phil was the first person to introduce structured psychometric feedback and the use of 360 questionnaires on public programmes into a UK business school.

Before joining Ashridge, Phil held management and organisational development roles in the service and transport industries for nearly 13 years. On leaving university his first work was as a volunteer social worker in the Solomon Islands, West Pacific, and before he completely grew up, he spent some time writing software to design computer chips. His degrees are in psychology and industrial psychology; professional qualifications with the IPD and BPS; he is an NLP Master Practitioner.

His earlier books are: A Practical Guide to Successful Interviewing, McGraw Hill; Effective Meetings, Century Business and The Sunday Times; Making Change Work, Mercury Books. As well as many articles, he has written three books on leadership:

• What High Performance Managers Really Do, with Stuart Crainer, Pitman 1993, looked at how senior leaders implement strategy in real situations.
• The Future of Leadership, with Randall White and Stuart Crainer, Pearson 1996, explored and researched the skills needed for effective future leadership in the face of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
• Relax It's Only Uncertainty, with Randall White, FT Prentice Hall, May 2001, offered research-based practical guidance on how leaders and managers can perform more effectively even when facing very high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Most recently, Phil has researched how people develop themselves once they have reached the highest leadership levels. His report, Top Leader Journey, published by Ashridge in March 2004, attracted wide interest. He is now working on a major research project that aims to explore and understand leadership from a European perspective. He is also investigating how success as an expert early in your career can hamper the subsequent leap into an effective leadership role.

Phil has been a visiting fellow at the Johnson Business School, Cornell, USA and the leadership speaker on the Cabinet Office Top Management Programme, UK. He is a visiting speaker at:

• Duke CE and Fuqua School, USA
• ESMT, Germany
• Leadership Forum Inc, USA
• Ashridge Business School, UK