May 27, 2021
Gus Lee is a best-selling author and nationally recognized leadership expert. He equips others with practical behavioral skills so they can consistently discern and do the highest moral action despite fears about self-interest. He has delivered practical Courageous Leadership Skills Intensives across fifty professions and industries and has coached executives from every continent. He and his wife Diane wrote Courage: The Backbone of Leadership and five other best-sellers on a central theme of moral courage. He has written for Time and Encyclopedia Britannica and been on national media.
Gus is from a broken and abusive immigrant home and grew up in African American inner-city streets. He was raised from the age of seven by three YMCA boxing coaches who stuck with him for ten years despite his cowardice and poor medical condition. With four medical waivers, he got into West Point, where he was mentored in courageous leading by Major H. Norman Schwarzkopf and CSM Theodore L. Dobol. He later learned character-based leading from Warren Bennis, founder of modern leadership theory.
Gus has been a corporate COO, chief learning officer, SVP, government senior executive, U.S. Senate ethics investigator, acting deputy attorney general, statewide trainer for California’s 5,000 prosecutors and then its 140,000 attorneys, senior deputy DA, FBI and POST trainer, Army officer, command judge advocate, drill sergeant, Army boxer and paratrooper who jumped with the ROK Airborne in two Asian tours. He was West Point’s first Chair of Character Development; lectured there on courageous leadership for 18 years and was an Army-wide trainer in military leadership. He was an adjunct faculty/visiting scholar for the Center for Creative Leadership, Development Dimensions International, U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Duke Fuqua School of Business and many other colleges, and B schools. He and Diane have two bio and two adopted children who together led ten-year missions in Africa, were wounded in combat and serve in law enforcement. They are blessed with seven grandchildren.