Morris, B. (Feb 21, 2000). Fortune, pp. 144-154.


Corporate coaching is one of the stranger wrinkles management these days - one of the hottest things in human resources, except that is does not usually come out of human resources. It is a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of Corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak. Coaches are everywhere these days. Companies hire them to shore up executives or, in some cases, to ship them out. Division heads hire them as change agents. It is not that executive coaching is particularly new. Chief executives and those approaching the top have long sought counsel from personal consultants, wise board members, or industrial psychologists. But in the past 5 years coaching has gone mass-market. In the age of Every man for Himself, every man can have a coach - and, in an ever more commonly held view, needs one.