Jonathan Cook

Biography

Jonathan Cook is chairman of the Nairobi-based African Management Initiative (AMI), a social enterprise focused on developing scalable approaches to support African managers in excellent performance, and adjunct faculty member and professional associate of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) of the University of Pretoria. After qualifying as a counselling psychologist he spent ten years with the National Institute for Personnel Research in Johannesburg, finally as head of assessment and counselling. His next fifteen years were spent as a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits Business School), where he founded the Management Development Unit and later became director of academic programmes. In 2004 he joined GIBS as senior lecturer and in 2011 was appointed as director, a position he held until December 2013. He still teaches part-time at GIBS in the areas of leadership and personal development, including the MBA core course human behaviour and performance in SA and an MBA elective called The Moral Leader. He left GIBS to take on the role of founding chairman of the AMI and to continue his consutling practice through Thornhill Associates, a company that provides online multirater feedback systems to organisations. He is chairman of AMI and Thornhill Associates, past chairman of the Association of African Business Schools, and currently serves as chairman of the AABS Agribusiness Management Project and community organisations Tomorrow Trust and Bizschool.

Research Interest

Self-assessment and peer feedback in leadership & Management development