An Interview with John Lazar: Institutions and Influences

Out of that initial expression of shared care and concern, we ended up revamping Bill’s proposal and presented it at the Executive Coaching Summit the next year, where it was enthusiastically accepted.  In fact, there were a number of people who were there at the summit who became members of the editorial board and stayed on for a number of years.  In 2003, we publish our first issue of The International Journal of Coaching in Organizations, or IJCO.  We published for nine years until I shut it down, I think, in December of 2011.

So I think that’s fair to say that IJCO was a direct offshoot of the conversations in the community of the Executive Coaching Summit.  There was a second offshoot that also emerged a couple of years later, I think, out in San Francisco from another Executive Coaching Summit.

People observed that we were reinventing the wheel of the Summit each year because we were not an organization.  We were simply a group of people that came together to make the event happen.  There was a rather extensive discussion and declaration of exploring the possibility of creating an organization that could house these kinds of events so that practitioners could come together and create learning and development opportunities, to create something amazing.

Out of that set of discussions, the task force that was formed and the decisions and recommendations that were made emerged the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations, or ICCO.  For the first year or year and a half I was acting executive director and, subsequently, I was a board member.  Ultimately, for a year and a half or so, I was president of the board of ICCO.

ICCO, though it wasn’t around for all that long, did some truly amazing work, especially in the area of developing learning events that were very cutting edge, like our Symposia, the design of which I think is even still very cutting edge.  The conversation at the Summit ended up creating a very excited but small group of followers and people who wanted to the play and wanted to have ICCO be successful.

I would say that one of the things that is similar between the journal and ICCO is that marketing and sales were never strong skills of many who played a role.  Perhaps part of the reason that both of those institutions failed to be sustainable was that we didn’t have sufficient expertise to effectively engage in those conversations and create the appetite for what they were providing. We did receive very high marks from journal subscribers and those participants at ICCO events.

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