I recently had a wonderful opportunity to talk to Linda Ackerman Anderson, co-founder of Being First, the change leadership and transformational change consulting and training firm based in Durango, Colorado. Linda has done a tremendous amount of change work for Fortune 1000 companies, as well as government and military organizations. She speaks all over the world and is one of the pioneer thought leaders in change management and organization transformation.

Linda and her partner/husband, Dean Anderson, have written two books:

Beyond Change Management: How to Achieve Breakthrough Results through Conscious Change Leadership and the companion piece, The Change Leader’s Roadmap: How to Navigate Your Organization’s Transformation. These books are in their second printing, and are now available at www.changeleadernetwork.com or your favorite bookseller.

I don’t often run across people who have been trying to understand change as long as I have, but Linda and I started off as novices at roughly the same time. She began her change management career in the late 70s, and by the early 80s, she had started her own consulting firm. Linda and I met soon after that, while we were working as consultants to Alcoa. I was struck by the depth and sensitivity of the perspectives that Linda brought to the work—and that was back in the early days when she was just formulating her ideas about change!

In the first segment of our interview, Linda gives her perspective on the deeper implications of conscious change leadership. more