Jack Martin Leith leading a workshop at European Sharing on Systems Thinking, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2015
Jack Martin Leith is a now-to-new practitioner living in the west of England.He grew up in an east London funeral parlour and left school when he turned 16, embarking on a succession of jobs in music publishing, fashion, retail and advertising before establishing Leith & Price, a company that helped advertising agencies and media owners pinpoint new business prospects and communicate with them effectively.
After taking a long sabbatical to recover from a life-threatening health issue, he founded a series of consulting practices specialising in collaborative innovation and change, and built an extensive client list that included ABN Amro Bank, Capita Symonds, European Commission, GlaxoSmithKline, Home Office, NHS, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, PricewaterhouseCooopers, Royal Dutch Shell, and WH Smith.
He was instrumental in bringing Open Space Technology, a participant-driven conference method, to the UK after experiencing it for the first time in 1988 at an international conference on organisation transformation. Over the course of the following decade, he was the co-convenor of three organisation transformation conferences held in various parts of Europe, all of which used the Open Space method.
Jack has been a prolific writer on management and organisational topics, and has led workshops at London Business School, University of Brighton, London School of Economics, Hult Ashridge and many other venues.
A lifelong inventor and a seasoned entrepreneur, his latest venture is Reopen, an online database of UK rail reopening schemes that he plans to complete before the end of December 2020 or early in 2021.
If you wish, you can follow Jack on Twitter: @JackAtReopen.