John Adair is an author of books on business leadership.

John Adair is an author of books on business leadership.

John is internationally acknowledged as having had a significant influence on leadership and management development in both the business and military spheres. He has seen military service, lectured at Sandhurst, worked extensively as a consultant, held professorships in Leadership Studies and authored well-received leadership and management books. More than one million managers throughout the world went through the Action-Centred Leadership (ACL) course that he pioneered in the 1970s.

John has had a varied and colourful career. After St Paul's School and Cambridge University he joined the Scots Guards and then became the only national serviceman to serve in the Arab Legion, where he was adjutant of a Bedouin regiment. Before going to university he qualified as a deckhand and worked on a deep-sea trawler in Icelandic waters. He also worked as a hospital orderly in an operating theatre.

After Cambridge he became Senior Lecturer in Military History and Adviser in Leadership Training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. All Britain's armed services base their leadership training on the functional leadership concept, which he introduced there during the 1960's. While at Sandhurst he led expeditions camel-riding in the Arabian desert and building a hospital in Nepal.

John holds the degrees of Master of Arts from Cambridge University, Bachelor of Letters from Oxford University and Doctor o f Philosophy from the University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

In 1978 he was appointed as the world's first Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Surrey. Other 'firsts' include introducing the world's first university degree course in Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter, and subsequently establishing Europe's first university-based Centre for Leadership Studies at the same university. Since 2006, he has been Honorary Professor of Leadership at the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong.

Today John is internationally recognised as a writer, teacher and adviser on leadership. His clients have included such organisation as ICI - the first British company to make a billion pounds profit - Exxon Chemicals in the United States, Mitsubishi, Lehman Brothers, BAE Systems, British Airways, the Church of England, the Department of Education and many other organisations in both private and public sectors.

His 30 books, such as Effective Leadership and Not Bosses But Leaders, have been translated into 18 different languages.