About Robert Rosenfeld

Robert has taught managers how to lead since 1981, which means he has also spent four decades watching them ignore the advice and figure it out anyway.

Born in Montreal and now based in London, Robert has worked with managers and leaders across more than 30 countries and 80 organizations, from FTSE 100 companies and international banks to government agencies and NGOs. His teaching has taken him from the University of Warwick, ParisTech in Paris, Tongji University in Shanghai, EHTP in Casablanca, Bayes Business School (London), Duke Corporate Education (USA), and Headspring (a joint venture of the Financial Times and IE Business School, Madrid) to Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, plus a few more along the way. That breadth of cross-cultural experience is not decorative: it shapes everything he writes.

His PhD from Warwick Business School examined how culture shapes employee attitudes across national boundaries. That research proved directly relevant to why the same mentoring approach works brilliantly with one person and falls flat with another.

In 1998, he founded the Centre for Organizational Excellence (Corex), a leadership development consultancy that worked with senior executives across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia for twenty-five years. His books draw on that accumulated experience: the conversations that worked, the ones that didn’t, and everything learned in between.

Over all those years, the same gap kept appearing on both sides of the mentoring table. Organizations invest heavily in finding mentors but very little in helping them get better at it, and the people being mentored usually get nothing at all. So he wrote one book for each chair. From Manager to Mentor: Conversations You Cannot Rehearse is for the person giving the hour. The Accidental Mentee: Conversations Worth Showing Up For (out 24 November 2026) is for the person on the other side, and shows them how to make that hour count.