Overview
Adam Bryant, Senior Managing Director and Partner at The ExCo Group, is a respected and noted expert on executive leadership who has interviewed more than 1,000 leaders for the “Corner Office” series he created at The New York Times and for his four current leadership series on LinkedIn—with CEOs, CHROs, board directors, and prominent Black leaders.
He is the author of four books on leadership, including “The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership,” and “The CEO Test: Master the Challenges that Make or Break All Leaders,” both of which were published by Harvard Business Review Press.
Bryant has a proven ability to distill real-world lessons and insights from his hundreds of interviews and turn them into practical tools, presentations, and exercises to help ExCo clients deepen their leadership benches and strengthen their teams. He also writes a monthly column on leadership for Strategy+Business magazine, serves on the editorial board of SHRM’s Journal of People+Strategy, and is the senior advisor to the Reuben Mark Initiative for Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia University.
Career History
Before joining The ExCo Group, Adam Bryant worked for 30 years as a journalist, including 18 years as a reporter, editor, and columnist at The New York Times, and six years as senior writer and business editor at Newsweek
Bryant interviewed more than 500 CEOs for “Corner Office,” a weekly series on leadership and management in The Times that he created in 2009 to explore the key leadership lessons that CEOs had learned (rather than asking them about their business strategies). His other two books are “Quick and Nimble; Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation,” and “The Corner Office; Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed.”
Bryant is an experienced and engaging speaker, who has presented at dozens of conferences to audiences of up to 5,000 people. He also regularly facilitates offsites for leadership teams, boards of directors, and cohorts of high-potential leaders. His approach is highly interactive, drawing on the insights, stories, and approaches of the more than 1,000 leaders he has interviewed to provide compelling presentations and lead personal reflection and breakout exercises.
Personal
Adam Bryant earned his bachelor’s degree from York University in Toronto and his Master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York. He and his wife have two daughters and live in New Orleans.