About the Author

Kent Jonasen co-founded Leadership Pipeline Institute in 2008 and is today CEO of LPI. Before founding LPI, he spent five years in the financial industry and twelve years within human resources in A.P. Moller – Maersk of which he was Deputy Head of Group Human Resources from 2003 to 2008. In this role he was responsible for talent management, leadership development, executive development and executive compensation.

During his tenure, he led the implementation of a companywide integrated leadership development initiative based on the ideas in the book, The Leadership Pipeline, to impact more than 10,000 leaders in more than 100 countries. His new book, The Specialist Pipeline, expands on his work for A.P. Moller-Maersk and for a number of large international clients, wherein Kent warns that the lack of focus on specialists and the absence of a specialist architecture present real business challenges.

While most organizations put words to the importance of specialists, few have created the architecture to support them properly. In an increasingly knowledge-based business environment, companies sincerely seeking to break down hierarchies and create more agile organizations, must integrate specialists much more effectively into the broader organizational structure.

Since founding the Leadership Pipeline Institute Kent has built a unique insight on how to design educational and developmental initiatives that are applicable to cultures across the world and delivers consistent measurable change in behavior. He has lead the implementation of the Leadership Pipeline and Specialist Pipeline concept with regards to development, selection, and assessment in more than 25 different large international organizations.