If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ve no doubt come across the words of Dr. John Kenworthy of Celsim Business leadership coaching.  Dr. John signed himself up for a CoachAccountable account on launch day back at the end of August, and since then has been the most publicly vocal fan of the system since.  Some days, in fact, I wonder if people think I contrived him as a character with which to have conversations in the comment threads on this blog.

He is very consistently pro CoachAccountable, after all.

But no, it turns out he is quite real indeed.  Despite the fact that we share the same first name, further supporting speculation that he is but a CA-promoting figment of my imagination, Dr. John lives in Singapore.

Now then, Tracy (my wife) and I are based in Denver, USA. but we are in the middle of a year’s worth of travel around the world.  So when Dr. John casually mentioned we come visit back in October (when we were then living in Nicaragua), I gave him a non-committal “Hey that would be cool, if we make it there I’d love to meet you!”.

Three weeks ago we managed to swing on by and visit the city-state of Singapore, and finally have lunch with the man.  Among a lot of things we talked about the origins of CA, how I came up with Metrics, and what’s next for the platform.  I even told him about the secret gallery feature which allows the embedding of images into worksheets, session notes, and so forth.  It’s a feature which entails a lot of complexity to make user friendly for folks who aren’t savvy to HTML, but that Dr. John has asked me for on a nearly monthly basis since the beginning.  (I’ve since enabled it for his account alone as an experimental feature.)

I also busted him on plagiarizing a paragraph or two of mine from the CoachAccountable manual in his new book, What’s Better Today, and he promptly busted me for forgetting that I gave him permission to do it months ago.

All in all we had a delightful time meeting after months of emailing back and forth.  The best (and most surprising) was hearing that about the time I’d saved him.  He said simply “You’ve saved me 15 hours, John”, to which I replied “Well cool, may it save you 15 hours more!”

“No, you’ve saved me 15 hours per week.”  15 hours to do other things every week because of the automated reminders, assignments, and follow ups, both in and out of courses.

Wow.

When I launched this thing from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru I couldn’t really know exactly how it was going to go.  Dr. John’s fandom in those early days made it all the easier to keep the faith as I progressed in relative obscurity.  While visiting over lunch it was my absolute delight to tell him as much and thank him accordingly.

Leadership from a Dancing Guy is an apt metaphor for how this all went down: I was the dancing nut, and he’s the first guy to join me, transforming an individual’s quirky behavior into a movement for the masses.

Thanks, Dr. John.