Major Jim Stroup, USMC (ret.) “enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, and served as an Infantry Marine in the United States and Japan, as well as on deployments to the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific. After several years, and promotion to the rank of sergeant, Jim was selected for a commissioning program.

As an Infantry Officer, Jim Stroup continued to serve as a commander and staff officer in the operating forces in Hawaii, with further deployments to the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Upon assignment to a major training command on the West Coast, he was instrumental in the expansion and development of three major specialty certification and professional development programs. Later, Jim served in the first Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. During his spare time in this period, Jim also completed his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in international relations, and a master’s degree with a dual concentration in business and management.

Jim Stroup subsequently entered the Marine Corps Foreign Area Officer program, and went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he learned Arabic. Next, he and his family moved to Cairo, Egypt, where they lived for a year while Jim traveled throughout the Middle East, honing his skills as a military expert for the area.

During this time, Jim Stroup also managed to obtain certification as a foreign area officer for Europe, with a specialty for Turkey. After serving a further tour as the operations advisor for the Kuwait Ground Forces, Jim retired and turned to work in the civilian world, during which period he also found time to complete a doctorate in business administration.”  Major Jim Stroup is the author of Managing leadership and Create a Management Development Program.

According to the book description of Create a Management Development Program, “Using this Infoline, readers will be able to build a management development program in their company. The audiences for this title are learning strategists, training managers, and human resources professional that make decisions about training. This title covers how to know what you want from your management program, find candidates, build your management program, and monitor the program so that it can evolve with your business needs.”

According to the book description of Managing Leadership, it “begins with a frank discussion of the history of the current leadership movement and its parallels with the ever-widening scandals enfolding the corporate and civil organizational environment, today. It provides a compelling case for the complicity of the untenable demands of the modern leadership movement in the occurrence of these scandals. It then surveys the literature, showcasing examples of more accurate and astute thinking that have, unfortunately, failed to receive adequate attention.

The heart of Managing Leadership is a carefully developed argument for the concept of organizational leadership as a naturally occurring phenomenon inherent to all organizations. Using examples from military and business, the case for this view is carefully and vividly presented. Finally, the main part of the book culminates in a chapter discussing methods for executives to manage the leadership inherent in their organizations. In an especially interesting innovation, the concluding section of the book opens with a unique chapter which contains vigorously presented arguments against the thesis of the book. The author recognizes that the view of organizational leadership presented in this book will certainly attract criticism. His goal in this chapter is to present some of these criticisms, and then to answer them. The author even invites additional critiques from readers, for possible inclusion in future editions of the book.

Managing Leadership proposes that the debate over what leadership in organizations really is needs to be reopened, and begins the debate with an important contribution of its own. The argument is that leadership is not properly viewed as an individual characteristic to be exhibited primarily by the senior executive, but one inherent to the organization, naturally expressed by all of its members, and managed by that senior executive. This view of leadership provides many benefits to the organization: 1) it unleashes the leadership seeking expression from within the organization in beneficial ways, 2) it frees senior executives from the extraordinary and untenable demands made of them by the modern leadership movement, and 3) it enables them to return to their principle duty of managing the organization - including the leadership inherent to it.