About Judy Brown | Partial Client List | Resume

About Judy Brown

Judy Brown is an independent educator, speaker, consultant, poet and writer, whose work in organizations revolves around themes of leadership, change, learning, reflection, dialogue, creativity, diversity and renewal.

She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Michigan State University, and has served as a White House Fellow, Special Assistant to the US Secretary of Labor, Chief Financial Officer, Assistant Dean and Director of Executive Programs of the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland, and Vice President for Seminars and Cooperative Programs of the Aspen Institute.

Dr. Brown teaches leadership in the graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and is a Senior Fellow of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership. She is affiliated with the University's National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and is also associated with the University's Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise.

She has served as lead faculty member for the American Symphony League's leadership institute, the Urban Library Council's Executive Leadership Institute, leadership programs in the field of smart growth, the intelligence community, and Leadership AAHSA, a program for leaders of innovation in the field of aging. She has been one of the founding facilitators in the Courage to Teach program supported by the Fetzer Institute. During the several years in which she worked extensively in the automotive industry, she served as an adjunct faculty member of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. Among her clients have been Ford, Visteon, Canon, The United Way, The Girl Scouts of America, The World Bank, Chrysler, MCI, Sprint, AT&T, Herman Miller and numerous non-profits and governmental organizations.

Best known for her ability to help individuals and teams of people think about problems and dilemmas in ways that free their energies so they can move forward in their work, she helps organizations discover common ground even in the midst of dissension, turbulence and complexity. She characterizes herself as a "thinking partner" or "learning partner" although others think of her as a public speaker, educator, leader of retreats, poet, facilitator, mentor and teacher. Her colleagues at the Shambhala Institute recently refered to her as "poet and facilitator extraordinaire".

In a sense, all of her work is about helping people recall deeper principles and their own essence in order to connect with the authentic in themselves and in others, and to uncover common ground within their work. Her mentor, John Gardner, in encouraging her to publish her collection of poetry The sea accepts all rivers (Miles River Press, 2000) said her poems were not only about courage but about "finding ourselves and finding each other." Much of her work takes the form of dialogue that enables people to create thinking-based learning structures (often within the work environment) that move them comfortably and naturally into the space of culture, feeling and spirit.

In 1993, having read Parker Palmer's Leading from Within, she invited Parker to join her for work with Herman Miller Corporation where she had been leading a series of great books seminars entitled "Freeing the Human Spirit". Their collaboration led to her participation as one of the original team of facilitators for the Courage to Teach Program sponsored by The Fetzer Institute. With Penny Williamson, she led a series of retreats with inner city Baltimore school teachers, and she continues that work in the Baltimore-Washington area.

A mid-westerner from the small fishing village of Leland, in northwestern Michigan, her heritage is that of agriculture and cooperative extension, which has given her a commitment to the practical use of ideas, thinking, research and science as a way to transform our lives and our work. Her 1995 book, written about her father's death and her life in the wake of that loss, The choice (Conari) is about dialogue, and the power of being able to talk about what matters most, even when we face very tough realities.

For many years, she has been linking leadership and learning as a way to think about sustainable change--the kind of change that allows for, and nurtures engagement, even in times of turbulence. That work has led to collaborations with the University of Michigan at Dearborn, Ford Motor Company, Visteon, the Learning Circle, Arthur Anderson, the Center for Creative Leadership and Outward Bound. She was a contributor to Learning Organizations (Renesch and Chawla) and her piece on natural steps for living a balanced and reflective life in the face of turbulence and change appeared in The inner edge. Her newest book is A Leader's Guide to Reflective Practice (2006) Trafford Publishing. With Michael Jones, pianist, composer and educator, she continues to explore the leadership lessons at the heart of the creative processes.

As a Quaker, she is interested in organizational processes which incorporate reflection and inquiry. As a writer and poet, she is intrigued by the power of language and metaphor to shift our thinking and open us to new perspectives. As an executive she is interested in how leaders sustain energy and a sense of purpose and direction. And as a scientist she is interested in understanding more fully how it is that we experience openings into greater awareness, and how those experiences allow us to gather our energies in powerful ways on behalf of transcendent, as well as social and organizational purposes.

January 2007

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