USD Magazine Spring 2009

t’s a simple memento. A rip-cord grip (the kind used to release a reserve parachute) affixed to a block of wood. But the keepsake on USD associate professor George Reed’s office wall is much more than that. It symbolizes the night that Reed — then a U.S. Army paratrooper performing a behind-enemy-lines training exercise — managed to walk away from a catastrophic parachute failure that should have killed him. “I like to say that I haven’t had a bad day since,” Reed chuckles. “I keep that up there as a reminder to myself that life is good, and it’s short, so we have to make the most of it.” Reed spent 27 years as an Army officer — including six as an instructor at the prestigious U.S. Army War College — before bringing his expertise to USD’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences in 2007. “The transition has actually been pretty easy,” Reed says. “Context matters when you’re talking about leadership, but the process of lead- ership extends across many different job sectors and endeavors. It’s not strictly science. It’s an art and a science.” Not that there aren’t some welcome differences in the military and civilian approaches to higher education. “In the Army, we worked with an insane work ethic,” Reed says.

“There were many competing demands on your time and a lot of that time was not your own. So to come into a field where discretionary time is part of the culture, I really relish that opportunity to pursue my own academic interests and research.” In addition to teaching leadership and organizational theory, Reed has used his scholarly freedom to focus particular attention on negative management styles. “I’m definitely interested in the dark side of leader- ship,” Reed says. “Truth is, we can learn just as much from bad examples as we can from the good ones.” Reed was drawn to USD for its reputation as a groundbreaking aca- demic leader in leadership studies; he says the research conducted by SOLES faculty translates to military officers and corporate professionals as well as it does to school principals and leadership consultants. Still, he relishes the challenge of adapting leadership principles across a variety of disciplines. “One particular leadership style isn’t going to be effective across all people and situations,” Reed says. “You can take one leadership approach if you have time to make a decision and the impacts are long-term. But if you’re in a position where the building’s on fire, you’re going to need a different approach.” —Nathan Dinsdale

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