Honouring a Leadership Icon: Remembering Professor John Adair and a Lifetime of Collaboration.

Lee Bushby and I attended the memorial service on 9 January 2025 for our long-time friend and colleague, the world-renowned leadership thinker Professor John Adair. For me, John was not only an inspirational figure in the field of leadership but also someone I had the privilege of working closely with. In the late 1970s, I worked with John at the Industrial Society, where we delivered numerous presentations and training assignments together for major organisations, including Mercedes-Benz, Air Products, BP, and several local authorities. Those years remain vivid in my memory. John brought clarity, purpose and quiet authority to everything he did. Following his time at Sandhurst, he developed the Action-Centred Leadership model, which went on to shape leadership training within the armed services and far beyond. Its simple yet powerful three-circle framework of Task, Team, and Individual captured John’s belief that effective leadership is about balance and responsibility, and it continues to influence leaders across commercial and government organisations today. John later became the world’s first Professor of Leadership, holding a chair at the University of Surrey, and authored more than fifty books. His writing extended beyond leadership into history, reflecting his deep curiosity and thoughtful perspective on human endeavour. We also collaborated with Michael Bailey in developing the Personal Leadership Profile which has been used not only nationally but also internationally and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. What I admired most was John’s conviction that leadership was not something you were simply born with, but something that could be learned, practised, and developed by anyone willing to try. That belief gave confidence and encouragement to countless people, myself included. As we reflect on his life and legacy in the 2020s, it is clear that John’s work remains as relevant, practical, and inspiring today as it was more than fifty years ago.