Jay Alden Conger

What if the most influential leaders you've ever met weren't the loudest people in the room but the ones who knew how to listen their way to influence? That question sits at the heart of Jay Conger's latest book, The Persuasive Leader. His fascination with leadership started early: his father served as Curator of the White House across four presidential administrations — Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan — giving Conger a front-row seat, from childhood, to power, influence, and leadership up close.

He holds the Henry R. Kravis Chair in Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, the London Business School, INSEAD in France, McGill University, and the University of Southern California.

His perspective, however, isn't purely academic. Before his career in research and teaching, he worked as a line leader himself, giving him firsthand experience with the daily pressures leaders face. He later brought that grounding into decades of research and consulting across hundreds of organizations and thousands of leaders— becoming one of a select group of authors to publish multiple pieces in the Harvard Business Review, including his influential article "The Necessary Art of Persuasion."

The Persuasive Leader distills all of it - his research, his time in the trenches as a leader, and his ongoing work as an executive coach and educator - into practical guidance any leader can use. A passionate teacher, Business Week named him the best business school professor to teach leadership; the Financial Times ranked him among the world's top management educators as well. He lives in California, where Claremont McKenna College's long tradition of producing influential leaders in business and government continues to shape the questions at the center of his work.