Nancy Austin Biography

Nancy Austin's work and writing has changed the way business does business. A leading authority and well-known speaker on smart management and the kind of leadership you can be proud of, Nancy Austin has addressed business, education, and military leaders in countries on six continents.

In 1985, Nancy Austin co-wrote, with Tom Peters, A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (Random House, hard cover; Warner Books, soft cover). An instant classic, the book rocketed to No. 1 (selling 500,000 copies in its first six months) and has been a long-standing favorite among businesspeople.

Nancy Austin's pioneering work in assertiveness training from the 1970s forward led to the publication in 1976 of the first edition of The Assertive Woman, co-authored with Stanlee Phelps. The book, currently in a lively and refreshed fourth edition, was the first written expressly for women about what "assertive" really means, and how assertiveness enriches personal and professional lives. It has sold half a million copies and has been published in twelve languages, among them Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, Spanish, and Dutch.

Nancy Austin, who holds a BA and an MBA from UCLA, was also affiliated with UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, where she was part of a team brought together to research, reimagine, and redesign the community mental health system in California. During this time, Nancy Austin also created and led skill-based coaching for health care practitioners, wrote frequently for professional journals, and delivered presentations that drew enthusiastic audiences.

After several years with leading consulting firms, Nancy Austin joined the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. Her mission was to identify and articulate the distinctive leadership and management practices that made the company great, and to help those skills take root in a whole new generation of company leaders around the world.

In 1983, Nancy Austin co-founded The Tom Peters Group, a consulting and research firm dedicated to deepening and applying the principles and management thinking that Peters first described in the landmark In Search of Excellence.

Nancy Austin also served—for more than a decade—as contributing editor at Working Woman magazine, a columnist for 1099 (a print and webzine for independent professionals), and as contributing editor for Incentive and Inc. magazines. She has contributed hundreds of feature articles and columns to professional journals, business and popular magazines. Austin is a frequent guest on television, radio, and in print, where she often discusses business excellence in a disruptive age, women in business, innovation, and distinctive leadership.

Nancy Austin lives with her husband south of San Francisco on the California coast.

Nancy Austin Topics

• Leadership Uncaged
  Everywhere you look, in every industry and every level, people are braving racy new circumstances and wild new kinds of competition. Modern leaders must break away from the brittle confines of molds and expectations about what leadership is and does. We've come a long way from Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management, where, a century ago, the search for "one best way" drove everything. Managers, once devoted to control, are adapting and improvising and provoking like crazy. All those troublesome quirks and idiosyncracies that managers were supposed to stamp out of employees (and, by the way, customers too) are today interesting and indispensable resources just waiting to be unleashed. There's never been a more perfect time to do something really, outstandingly different. So the true work of leadership is, above all, to be passionate; to dream big; to make hay with the talent that resides in the people who work alongside you; to keep everybody focused on a purpose that's bigger-than-money; and to do it all with real integrity and credibility.
• A Passion for Excellence
  Management fads come and go, but the real stuff holds up over time. These are the strategies you can count on this year, next year, and for the next 50 years. Customers are crucial; wowing them and staying close to them are business fundamentals. Constant, robust, disruptive innovation is the only survival strategy, and the right people and distinguished leadership are the heart of the matter. But, amazingly, this doctrine is fairly new: Nancy Austin, writing with Tom Peters, was the first to strongly underscore this "blinding flash of the obvious". The number-one bestseller that went on to become a business classic marked the very first time that the role of the customer was emphasized beyond mere discussion. That powerful revelation forever changed attitudes about the way business does business. Nancy Austin, of course, has a unique advantage when essaying this topic: she's an original source, with a compelling and authentic perspective. In this presentation, Austin revisits the beginnings of modern management and traces its uphill climb from "universal science" to magic bullet to something inventive and improvised, where everybody is connected to everybody and everything. Talent, wherever it may be, runs the show. Learning isn't just a strategy, it"s the strategy, and innovation-messy though it is-happens because the enterprise is designed to let it happen.
• Women, Talent, and Leadership
  A century ago, leadership was an ultra-formal, contained discipline governed by male-authored rulebooks. In this time of boundless opportunity, however, real leadership does not start with a rule: it begins with a roar. And nobody knows more about this than women. This presentation reveals that the true work of leadership is to be un-boring, to trust one's gut, to improvise, to pay attention to others and to connect. There has never been a better time for women to shine. This presentation is not solely about equality and taking women seriously; it's about economics and natural talent. Women really are powerful, and the wealth of smart companies and nations proves it!