Dr. Matt Dearmon - Two Turntables and the Right Tone: Practice and Theory in Corporate Leadership Development

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Matt Dearmon is the Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica, an organization that empowers next-generation cloud data innovation. Matt has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career as an educator before moving to coaching and e-learning. Eventually, he moved from leading small, learning-focused companies, including his own, to guiding leadership and professional development at the global enterprise level. Matt is a dedicated leader focusing on innovative excellence, an expert curriculum developer, and an experienced facilitator with a passion for applied learning.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “I’ve always kind of understood theory and practice as two records on a turntable. How do you blend those? How do you sync the tempo? How do you get the tonality to match?  How do you get the right key?”
• “One of the things I love about leadership is that I like to think of it as an asymptotal craft. An asymptote is a geometric figure where a line is infinitely close to both the x and the y axis, but it never quite touches - for infinity, it’s always closer and closer to the X-axis on this side and closer and closer to the Y-axis on this side. But it never quite touches its asymptotal - you’re never going to get there.”
• "My secret weapon is that research capability that I draw directly from my experience in academia."
• “Like a lot of practitioners, I rely a little bit on some of your aggregators of research - MIT Sloan or HBR. I think that’s a good place to start, especially for a practitioner in the field to understand having a framework or an approach or a school of thought that might go a little bit deeper. Then I’ll find some strains that I can dig into, and I’ll start going back to the research and dig a little bit deeper on it.”

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• Book - Assemblage Theory (Speculative Realism) by Manuel DeLanda 
• Album - Dawn Richard - Second Line
• Album - John Batist - We Are
• Documentary - Beatles - Get Back

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals with a keen interest in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. Plan now for ILA's 24th Global Conference Online October 6 & 7, 2022, and/or Onsite in Washington, D.C., October 13-16, 2022.