Business Coaching: Wisdom and Practice

About the Authors

SUNNY STOUT-ROSTRON, DPROF, MA
Sunny coaches at senior executive and board level, and has a wide range of experience in leadership development and business strategy. With over 20 years’ international experience as an executive coach, Sunny believes there is a strong link between emotional intelligence and business results – she works with executive leaders and their teams to help them achieve individual, team and organisational goals.
Director of Sunny Stout-Rostron Associates, she is a Research Mentor for the Institute of Coaching at Harvard/McLean Medical School, and a non-executive director with Resolve Encounter Consulting in Johannesburg. As Founding President of the professional association Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA), Sunny is passionate about the development of leaders and leadership coaches in South Africa. She completed her Doctoral research into Executive Coaching with Middlesex University London, and is currently involved in developing international standards for business coaches with the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches (WABC). She frequently speaks at conferences in the USA, UK, South Africa and Australia, and is a founding faculty member of the Thinking Environment® (developed by Nancy Kline) in South Africa.
Sunny manages an executive coaching practice, while continuing to develop new leadership and executive coaching programmes within the corporate, legal and education sectors worldwide. She has played a leading role in building the emerging profession of coaching, and her passion is to develop the knowledge base for coaching through research and the critical reflective practice of dedicated coach practitioners.
As an author, Sunny’s books include: Business Coaching International: Transforming Individuals and Organizations (Karnac, 2009); Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (Knowres, 2009); Accelerating Performance: Powerful New Techniques to Develop People (Kogan Page, 2002), and Managing Training (Kogan Page, 1993). She is a contributing author to Passmore, J. et al., The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Coaching and Mentoring (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Positive Psychology as Social Change (Springer, 2010); Sharing the Passion: Conversations with Coaches (Advanced Human Technologies, 2006); The Sage Handbook of Coaching (Sage, 2009); and Trends in Developing Human Capital (Knowres, 2010).

MARTI JANSE VAN RENSBURG, MBA (Contributing author)
Marti Janse van Rensburg has an extensive and varied business background that she brings to her successful coaching practice. This broad experience, ranging from scientific research to corporate management, gives her invaluable, hands-on knowledge and insights, both of which provide a critical key to understanding clients and coaching in the corporate world.
Marti’s clients range from Woolworths, Johnnic Publishing, Standard Bank, Eskom, Sasol, Discovery, Liberty, IS, McKinsey & Company, AngloGold Ashanti, to the US Centre for Leadership and Public Values (a joint venture with the University of Cape Town and Duke University). Marti coached and facilitated the ALDP (Accelerated Leadership Programme) at Sasol through the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).
In addition to one-on-one coaching, Marti facilitates team coaching and leadership development for clients such as the Eskom CEO Programme. She designed a countrywide training programme for Standard Bank managers on how to give and receive feedback. She also designed a Performance Coaching programme for Standard Bank in conjunction with their Leadership Development Team, and started their Leader-as-Coach Programme at the Global Leadership Centre (GLC).
In 2003, Marti was involved in the ground-breaking Action Reflection Learning (ARL) programme at the MIL Institute in Sweden. Marti was a founding director of the professional association Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA), and is a member of the WABC (Worldwide Association of Business Coaches). She took part in the Global Convention on Coaching (GCC) Working Group on a Research Agenda for Development of the Field, 2007–8.
In her previous career, Marti was a researcher at the CSIR before moving into the high fashion industry where she worked as a designer and owner of a training facility for designers. She taught and consulted for 10 years in fashion retail, which gave her business experience in Asia. Marti has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pretoria, and an MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) with a focus on executive coaching. Her coaching and leadership development career over the past 10 years has introduced her to a range of international coaches, consultants and clients in Africa, the UK, Europe and the USA.