James Andrew Burruss:  

When I left high school I thought I would pursue a career in Engineering. Two years at a small school in Ohio and one year at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, however, convinced me that my real passion had more to do with understanding people, organizations, and cultures than with designing aircraft engines. I went back to school and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University. Along the way, I ran a school for emotionally disturbed adolescents in the Boston Public Schools, conducted therapy groups for inmates in Massachusetts prisons, and spent a year living and working on an economic development project in a small fishing village in Ghana, West Africa. The latter experience is probably the single most life-changing event of my adult life -- short of my marriage and the birth of my daughter. As my first experience outside North America, it challenged my whole sense of what is important in life and my ability to learn from new life experiences. It forced me to develop new adaptation skills, taught me a lot of humility, and left me with a much better sense of who I am and what I want to do with my life. Since then, I have had a very gratifying career as a management consultant for a global consulting firm founded by my advisor in...Expand for more