Bill Wilkie – Principal and Founder
Bill Wilkie calls Excellence the largest hidden cost in business, and has created the only path out of excellence and to mastery designed purpose-designed specifically for leaders.
With an academic background in music, ethics, religion, philosophy and psychology, Bill spent nineteen years working with leading organizations in the far flung areas of business strategy, brand development, organizational development, and leadership advising. Bill built the Charism Model to take a leap forward from the synergies between these experiences.
As a thought leader, Bill is co-creator of the Charism Model of Leadership Mastery, and was first to identify and diagnose The Excellence Trap. He has created a unique, paradigm-making path to Mastery specifically for elite senior leaders. This generative yet strategic creativity is a hallmark of Bill’s entire life. Always straining at the edges to build something newer, smarter, better, more effective, integrated, borderless, and meaningful, with less nonsense, inertia, and tunnel vision. He lives to be “paradigm-making.” He is a frequent blogger on the topic of escaping excellence to achieve Mastery, and is a powerful speaker at conferences and forums.
As a leadership advisor, Bill works one on one with senior leaders, and has been a facilitator of senior leadership and team programs with Charism Advisors, and via the Center for Creative Leadership, and for leading firms Manus Associates and Blessing-White, where his many clients included Bank of America, GE Capital, Rockwell, and a score of others. He has also consulted to prestigious congregations, museums, and art groups.
As a strategist, Bill has worked on behalf of global brands such as Microsoft, MSN, Xbox, Swiss Army, Fidelity, W.L. Gore, Chevron, General Motors, AGFA, Amazon, Wolverine, Seventh Generation, and many more (see Clients). He has been a brand strategist for JWT, Wieden+Kenndy, and McCann-Erickson, and the principal in his own brand strategy firm.
As a musician, he has performed on internationally distributed albums for award-winning independent labels, on television jingles, and at festivals, showcases and clubs, and on a few hallowed concert stages. He has composed 10 CD’s worth of music, and captures it in his recording studio.
As a seeker, Bill has both formally studied and deeply engaged the world’s great mastery and wisdom traditions. He champions no single path, but rather integrates and applies the best of these schools and traditions as appropriate on behalf of great leaders. It’s big think with feet on the ground.
Bill studied music (jazz and theory) for three years at The New England Conservatory of Music via a dual degree program with Tufts University, holds a Bachelors Degree from Fairfield University in both Religious Studies and Music, with a minor in Applied Ethics, and earned a Masters Degree from Yale University Divinity School concentrating in Ethics, where he also did advanced coursework in the schools of Management and Law.
