Genie Z. Laborde
Genie Z. Laborde (born 1928) is an American author, educator, video producer, and artist. She is the founder and CEO of International Dialogue Education Associates, Inc., a business seminar company based in Palo Alto, California. She has authored several business communication and negotiation books and designed the three-day business seminar “Influencing with Integrity”. Biography. Laborde’s doctoral degree is from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her major discipline was Confluent Education, which is Gestalt psychology applied to the educational process. The Confluent Education program was founded by a Ford Foundation Grant for Innovative Education . Laborde’s Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing was conferred by Tulane University, and her Bachelor of Arts in Design and Fine Art was earned at Louisiana State University. Influences. Interested by the new esoteric classes offered at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California which formed a key part of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s, during the 1970s she studied with many of the leaders of this movement including George Leonard, Alan Watts, George I. Brown, Gay Luce, Frank Barron, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Downing, Barbara Brennan, and received Arica Training. Career. In 1984, Laborde  published the communication and negotiation book "Influencing with Integrity: Management Skills for Communication and Negotiation", which sold over 151,000 copies and was translated into several languages. The book’s instructional content supports her three-day Influencing with Integrity seminar. The skills taught in the seminar are drawn from Gestalt psychology, linguistics, and right brain insights. While some of the skills overlap with those of neuro-linguistic programming, Laborde emphasizes the psychological principles of Fritz Perls as well as the concrete and theoretical differences between integrity and manipulation in business communication and actions. In 1991, Laborde traveled to Russia on invitation  from the Russian Psychological Association to teach seminars which included research demonstrating a statistically important movement towards increased personal responsibility as shown by the pre- and post-test figures. Her communication and negotiation seminars have been taught at the United Nations as well as worldwide. Laborde has produced video training films and courses on her influencing and communication techniques. In 2011 her company International Dialogue Education Associates, Inc. released its first iPhone application “Circle of Excellence”. During the course of her career, Laborde has been a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and the American  Society for Training and Development (ASTD). Laborde has given numerous presentations to the ASTD and was invited to be the keynote speaker for the annual Conference of the ASTD Global Network South Africa in Johannesburg. She has been a visiting scholar at the Western Michigan University, and was selected for the listing of Who’s Who in the West. The "Mercury News" featured her as the "Grandmother of Silicon Valley" in regards to her Palo Alto real estate where a number of tech giants including Nest got their start