John Lingvall

Background

About John Lingvall

At this point in my career I've accumulated 40 years of experience in working with executives and organizations to accelerate learning and improve performance. Some of my favorite times have been facilitating strategic planning, visioning, leadership, team building and process improvement sessions for up to hundreds of people at a time. I love the energy and sense of accomplishing something meaningful in real time that one gets in these sessions. Like many in my field, I arrived purely by accident. Shortly after completing my studies at Georgetown University I left the United States on a journey that took him throughout the Middle East and India to the Himalayas in Nepal. After a year of adventures in the east I wasn’t quite ready to return, so settled in Iran for the next five years. It was there that I got into the training field as an English instructor for the Imperial Iranian Air Force in Tehran. By the time the revolution hit in 1978-79 I had become quite experienced in the field and was working for Bell Helicopter in the beautiful city of Isfahan. My son Erik was also born there, so now enjoys dual citizenship. Upon my return to the states, I tried my hand at a couple of business ventures (including a Persian carpet shop – “Beyond the Fringe”) but wound up back in training, this time in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for six months. After this stint I returned to San Francisco and accepted a job at Bank of America corporate training from a person who had been my last manager in Iran! Small world. I also entered a master’s program in educational technology at San Francisco State University, and finally studied something that was directly related to my profession, since it appeared I now had one! That lead to the other stops along the way, aka my resume below.