This is the team of Czech experts I worked with together with Professor Pim Van Arkel, in Prague to develop their course for Public Health Leadership. The clearest message is that leadership is a relationship in which power and responsibility is shared based on the trust that is built up between members of the health team and the public. I also worked with teams in Lithuania and Hungary and later with a team of international experts at WHO, each time adding to our understanding of  the theory and the practice of leadership for health. 

Professor Joan Woodward, who was the leading UK thinker about organisations and the people who led and worked in them, gave me the encouragement and support I needed to undertake a PhD in the management and leadership of collieries in 1969. She took me in to her new Industrial Sociology Unit at Imperial College and was my first PhD supervisor, I owe a great debt of gratitude to her kindly guidance and wisdom. When she died in 1971 I remember picking bluebells on the way back from her funeral with Don Harper, who took over as superviser, he was a social psychologist with a great flair for understanding people and what motivated them (perhaps a trigger for my later interest in social marketing). My external examiner was Keith Thurley of the LSE, which is why my doctorate was awarded by the Faculty of Economics (a focus for much of my later work). I enjoyed great support from my colleagues, Sandra Dawson, Janine Nahapiet, Arthur Francis, Celia Davies and Dot Griffiths, all now senior academics.