I would like to invite MSR members to honor Dr. Peter B. Vaill and let him know that we do on his upcoming birthday, Monday Nov 5. Dr. Vaill has been a leader for decades in the field of Spirituality and Management. He is presently Senior Scholar in Antioch University's Ph.D. program in Leadership and Change, and an Emeritus Professor of Management of the same institution. For years, he was professor of Human Systems and directed the Ph.D. program for the School of Business and Public Management at George Washington University.
Dr. Vaill has been speaking and writing about spirituality in management since the early 1980s, with many published works in this arena, including his 1989 book Managing as a performing art: New ideas for a world of chaotic change, his 1990 book chapter "Executive development as spiritual development" In S. Srivastva, D.L. Cooperrider (Eds), Appreciative management and leadership, and his 1996 book Learning as a way of being: Strategies for survival in a world of permanent white water, all published by Jossey-Bass. Decades ago he conceptualized and wrote about the way managers must act and lead in "permanent white water," writing as well that
"in the face of all our half-conscious assumptions about how scientific management and leadership are, I wish to insist on the idea that we cannot banish the need for faith...." (Managing as a performing art, p. 193). This book includes an extended discussion of spirit and spirituality in various arenas of life. He connected high performance in teams and business to the presence and expression of spirit and pointed out how the constant change we would be continuing to experience (which seems now to be increasing) made it hard to "experience the spiritual possibilities of the work we do and the people we do it with" (p. 219).
I last saw him as the keynote speaker of the Bay Area ODN Conference in 2001, probably shortly before he contracted the spinal meningitis that led to a spinal cord injury, paraplegia, and wheelchair dependence. For the last 11 years, he has lived independently and struggled with a common concern for those with mobility challenges.
Please send him a note for his birthday, to let him know that many people in the field remember and honor him, even though he doesn't know us all! You can visit his web page at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/petervaill You'll need to sign in to access his account. Once you sign in with email and password, then to enter his "site" you simple write his name run together all lower case (petervaill). His page should appear. Click on "make a Guestbook entry." It auto-signs for you, so you don't need to put your name at the end of your post. PS - Thanks to Maria Lam for informing me about Peter's upcoming birthday and for suggesting that we write to him!
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