John Adair - fondly remembered (even if never met)

John Adair died this week. He’s probably not a name many people would recognise, but through his teaching, he changed many lives.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, Adair became one of the most influential thinkers on leadership around. He came up with a wonderfully simple idea — that good leadership is about balancing Task, Team and Individual. Three overlapping circles, as a practical way of thinking about how real people actually lead. Even more importantly, he helped move leadership away from the idea of the born genius or the heroic “great man”, and towards something far more hopeful: that leadership can be learned.

I stumbled across his work straight out of university, mainly because my very first job was at The Industrial Society. And honestly, it still hurts how good that job was! The place was soaked in John Adair’s thinking. His Action-Centred Leadership (ACL) model was everywhere — taught not just to managers, but to undergraduates and even sixth-formers. Leadership felt human and accessible rather than distant or intimidating.

We lost Charles Handy last year as well, and the two of them were pretty much the first “management thinkers” I ever encountered, before Tom Peters or Stephen Covey and then many others.

More than thirty years on, I now find myself working at one of the world’s leading business schools and I genuinely think it all traces back to that first role at The Industrial Society, and its brilliant student arm, the Student Industrial Society (SIS).

That, for me, is John Adair’s real legacy. Not just a model, but a simple, generous idea: that leadership isn’t reserved for the chosen few. It’s something ordinary people can learn, practise, and grow into — often without even realising it at the time