Art Petty

Art Petty is a multi-decade software industry executive and a popular leadership and management author. After guiding multiple software firms to positions of market leadership as a senior strategy and marketing executive, Art now serves clients as a keynote speaker and workshop presenter and is an active management team and executive coach. Additionally, Art regularly serves as a graduate management educator at DePaul University in Chicago, IL.

Art’s practical and powerful business guidance is reflected in his highly ranked Management Excellence blog and in his popular Leadership Caffeine posts. Art's books, Practical Lessons in Leadership (with Rich Petro) and Leadership Caffeine—Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development are used as key resources in leadership programs for organizations in manufacturing, law enforcement, software and technology and units within the U.S. Armed Forces. His latest book, "Leadership Caffeine for the Project Manager," offers ideas, approaches, and inspiration for any professional leading teams, groups or initiatives. 

Art’s corporate credits include building a market-leading systems business unit within Panasonic, Inc., and guiding a little-known software firm on life support to become an acknowledged marketplace leader in data quality tools, leading to its eventual acquisition by Business Objects, Inc., (now part of SAP). Serving as a Senior Vice-President for Satori Software—a NeoPost Company—Art helped build the team and strategy that vaulted this unit into a leading market position in postal automation and contact data quality software and services.

Whether serving as an educator, coach, executive or speaker, Art’s passionate and no-nonsense guidance for navigating strategy, driving change and promoting organizational health through values-centered leadership is widely respected. From presenting highly rated leadership programs at Fortune 50 firms, technology industry associations and many corporate and governmental clients, Art’s passion for great leadership and management practices and practical advice earn high acclaim.

Clients credit Art with helping them re-conceive their strategies and their approaches to leading and operating through his ability to ask and help them find the answers to the difficult questions that derail most teams. Art attributes his success to his sheer passion for the pursuit of high performance with and through others and to his focus on practicing and perpetuating values-based leadership.

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, B.A. Finance
• DePaul University, Chicago, IL, M.B.A. Finance
• Northwestern Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Evanston, IL
  • Kellogg Management Institute
  • Kellogg Executive Scholars Program

The gravitational pull of the urgent in our day jobs keeps most of us staring out at the view of our parking lot day after day. To grow, you've got to change the view. -Art Petty