Donald J. Polden is dean emeritus and professor of law atSanta Clara University, where he served as dean of the School of Law for tenyears. He is a well-recognized authority on leadership education anddevelopment for lawyers and law students. He drew national attention to theneed for more formal and research-based scholarship and curriculum developmentin legal education through the early creation of a law school course on lawyersas leaders. Professor Deborah Rhode of Stanford, another early pioneer of lawyerleadership education, referred to Don as “truly a founding father of the fieldof lawyers and leadership.”Don also is a demonstrated leader, serving as dean of twomajor law schools from 1993 to 2013 and promoting legal education within theAmerican Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. His list ofsignificant leadership roles includes chair of the ABA committee that establishedaccreditation standards for more than two hundred law schools, leading dozensof law school accreditation teams, and serving as president of the Memphis BarAssociation, to name a few. While at Santa Clara University, Don has served asdirector of the law school’s Center for Global Law and Policy, responsible forten international legal education programs, several of which he taught in whilealso lecturing on comparative law at universities in China and Hungary. Don isfrequently called upon to serve as a mediator, arbitrator, and judicial officerin many Santa Clara campus disciplinary proceedings.Following service as Santa Clara’s dean, Don has beenactively engaged in teaching and scholarship, especially in the areas ofleadership development, professional identity formation of law students and newlawyers, and lawyering skills and competencies. He also continues to teachcorporate, sports, and antitrust law, and cofounded and led Santa Clara’snationally prominent Institute for Sports Law and Ethics. Don consults with lawfirms on leadership development of their lawyers, such as intellectual propertyand corporate law powerhouse Haynes Boone, and lectures at the U.S. Army’sJudge Advocate General graduate program on leadership development of U.S. Armylawyer officers, the University of Calgary law school, and others.Don created and leads Santa Clara’s Institute for LawyerLeadership Education, which has conducted several national conferences andworkshops on educating lawyers and students in leadership in the legalprofession, including five leadership workshops for legal education hosted by SantaClara from 2005 to 2013. He was instrumental in the 2018 launch of a newSection on Leadership for the Association of American Law Schools. This sectionincludes more than six hundred members, representing nearly one hundred lawschools’ courses and programs. The section meets annually to promote leadershipeducation in law schools, advance legal scholarship concerning law andleadership, and arrange programming. In 2020–21, Don served as chair of thesection.Don received an undergraduate degree in business economicsfrom The George Washington University and his JD from Indiana University Schoolof Law. During law school, he wrote for the Indiana Law Review and followinggraduation served as a judicial law clerk on both state appellate and federaltrial courts. He practiced antitrust law, including participating in fivefederal jury trials, and he argued several cases in the U.S. Courts of Appealand the U.S. Supreme Court. Don is licensed to practice law in the state ofIowa and federal courts.Don has been teaching leadership for lawyers’ classes formore than a decade and is a frequent speaker at national conferences, other lawschools’ classes, and within law firms on leadership and the legal profession. Heis the author of numerous law review articles on lawyer leadership, which havebeen published in the Baylor Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review, the HofstraLaw Review, the Tennessee Law Review, and the Tennessee Journal of Law andPolicy. His antitrust scholarship has been published in the Harvard Journal onLegislation, and his work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Doncoauthored Sports, Ethics and Leadership and Leading in Law: LeadershipDevelopment for Law Students (with Barry Posner), and he has authored severalbook chapters on lawyer leadership, employment law, and government regulationlaw. Don received the Edwin Owens Lawyer of the Year award given by the SantaClara University Law School.Barry Z. Posner is the Michael J. Accolti, S. J. Professor of Leadership at Santa Clara University and chair of the Management and EntrepreneurshipDepartment in the Leavey School of Business, where he previously served for twelve years as dean, six years as associate dean for graduate programs,and six years as associate dean for executive education. Barry has received the Association for Talent Development’s highest award for Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance. He has been recognized as one of the top fifty leadership coaches in America, ranked among the most influential HR thinkers in the world by HR magazine, and Inc. magazine included him among the world’s top seventy-five leadership and management experts.Barry is the coauthor (with Jim Kouzes) of the award-winning and best-selling leadership book The Leadership Challenge. Now in its seventh edition,with more than three million copies in print, the book continues to be a groundbreaking research study, combining keen insights with practical applications, and has been translated into twenty-two foreign languages. It is listed among The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, receiving book-of-the-year honors by the American Council of Health Care Executives and Fast Company, and the Critics’ Choice Award from the nation’s bookreview editors. Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) has been called “the most reliable, up-to-date leadership instrument availabletoday.” The 360-degree online version has been completed by more than four million people.Barry has coauthored other award-winning, inspiring, andpractical books on leadership: Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership: Howto Make a Difference Regardless of Your Title, Role, or Authority; Leading inLaw: Leadership Development for Law Students; Leadership in Higher Education:Practices that Make a Difference; Stop Selling & Start Leading; LearningLeadership: The Five Fundamentals for Becoming an Exemplary Leader; TurningAdversity into Opportunity; Finding the Courage to Lead; Great LeadershipCreates Great Workplaces; Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why PeopleDemand It; The Truth about Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter FactsYou Need to Know; Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding andRecognizing Others; A Leader’s Legacy; Extraordinary Leadership in Australiaand New Zealand; Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Asia; and The StudentLeadership Challenge.Barry is an internationally renowned scholar who haspublished more than one hundred research and practitioner-oriented articles insuch publications as the Harvard Business Review, Academy of ManagementJournal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Relations, Personnel Psychology,Journal of Selling, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He hasserved on a number of public and nonprofit boards, such as the AmericanInstitute of Architects, Berkeley Food Network, Center for Excellence inNonprofits, Global Women’s Leadership Network, Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity,SVCreates, and Uplift Family Services.He received an undergraduate degree in political sciencefrom the University of California–Santa Barbara, a master’s degree from TheOhio State University in public administration, and his PhD in organizational behaviorand administrative theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. AtSanta Clara, he has received several outstanding teaching and leadershiphonors, including the President’s Distinguished Faculty Award and the School’sExtraordinary Faculty Award. Barry has been a visiting professor at theUniversity of Western Australia, Hong Kong University of Science andTechnology, Sabanci University (Istanbul), the University of Auckland (NewZealand), and Seattle University. He has made presentations and conductedleadership development programs for corporations across the globe and has beeninvolved with leadership development efforts at more than seventy-five collegecampuses.
