Terry Pearce Biography

Terry Pearce is the Founder and President of Leadership Communication, a company that coaches high-profile corporate, political and community leaders.

In 2003, Business Week magazine called Terry the “eminence grise” of leadership coaches, as his clientele list includes a select group of leaders from around the world.

The content and method of his coaching are departures from conventional wisdom, and are designed to move people to commitment rather than mere compliance, inspiring new levels of contribution and innovation across a spectrum of ethnic, religious, geographic and cultural boundaries.

Terry was an Adjunct Professor at The Haas Graduate School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, (retired 2008) and has served as a visiting faculty member at The London Business School for the MBA program and the Sloan Fellowship Programme.

In 2006, he participated in the Ethics and Leadership Roundtable at Stanford, where he joined other thought leaders in providing case studies to be used to educate future leaders at the Stanford Graduate Business School. He is a doctoral candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, studying Comparative Mythology and Depth Psychology, and in 2007, he hosted the Forum on Cross-Cultural Inspiration in San Francisco to explore the ways in which people are inspired without regard to their basic beliefs or cultures.

The first edition of Terry’s best-selling work, “Leading Out Loud, A Guide for Engaging Others in Creating the Future,” was honored by Executive Summaries as one of the best thirty business books of 1996. The third edition was released in 2013. This work is broadly acknowledged as creating the field of Leadership Communication as a distinct discipline and continues to set the standard for the subject.

His second book was written with David Pottruck, former CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation. “Clicks and Mortar….Passion-Driven Growth in an Internet-Driven World” was on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Business Week Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. It was featured in an article in the New York Times, and the authors were interviewed on Charlie Rose. Terry has also published articles in Executive Excellence, The Handbook of Technology Management, and The National Productivity Review.

The principles from all of Terry’s works are used as the basis for corporate leadership development programs offered through BlessingWhite, and by communication departments in colleges and universities around the world.

Terry’s background is as eclectic as his current activities. He was educated in Oregon in business and religious philosophy; then spent 17 years as a manager and executive with IBM. In the 80’s he worked extensively in citizen diplomacy, and pioneered American business activities in the Soviet Union as a co-founder of Partners, a Soviet-American trading company.

He is a former Fellow and Senior Vice President of Executive Communication for Charles Schwab & Co., and his work there from 1994 through 2002 won both the “Golden Quill” award from the International Association of Business Communicators and the “Compass” award from the American Association of Public Relations.

Terry is active in the community as well, having served on the boards of the National Endowment for Financial Education (Chair, 2009), the Pottruck Family Foundation, A Network for Grateful Living and Up With People. He is currently a board member at Center Point and The Pacific Graduate Institute. Terry is a founding director of The Partnership for a Drug-Free California and a former director of The Healthy Cities Project at the Institute for the Study of Social Change.

He has two living children, six grandchildren, and lives in San Rafael, California.