M.A., Organizational Psychology
B.S., World Music and Engineering (Double Major)
A.m. is Founder/CEO of District Arts & Education, a non-profit educational provider with campuses in New Haven and Stamford committed to developing a generation of humane technologists, and the Founder of U of Next, a human and organizational development firm that has worked on large-scale innovation in Tech, Pharma, and FinServ in Europe and N. America. Over the 25+ years of advising corporate executives and entrepreneurs, a.m. and his colleagues have developed an approach to working with human systems that creates the deep inter- and intrapersonal health that allows individuals and organizations to not only weather transformative change that is forced on them, but also be accountable initiators of it in service of long-term growth and development.
A.m.’s past clients have included Pfizer, Facebook, HAI Group, Siemens, Novartis, Deutsche Bank, United Rentals, Yahoo!, American Express, and many others in North America, Europe, and Asia.
In addition to the University of New Haven, a.m. is on faculty at the Chicago Theological Seminary and is the Academic Director and Lead Educator for the M.A. in Organizational Leadership program at The Graduate Institute. He is a regular public speaker and has written a small book, The Triple-Soy Decaf-Latte Era, that has been called the ‘core philosophy for business in the 21st century’. He is currently working on a textbook for Transformative Human Development.
Read more about Al in the article Holding Space in the Winter 2018 issue of the University of New Haven Alumni Magazine.
Human Resource Planning Society *
SHRM (CT, NE Regional, and National events)*
Advanced Learning Institute *
International Association of Business Communicators
The Conference Board*
Vistage International*
Association of Governmental Risk Pools
YPO
CT Hospital Association
Human Resource Association, CT
Human Resource Leadership Forum, CT*
Linkage International*
Longwood Symposium
Massachusetts OD Learning Group
Association of Fundraising Professionals
National Speakers Association
Society for Information Management
Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
TEDx
World Future Society*
* = multiple events / presentations
See MoreMetLife
American Express
GE Capital
State Farm Insurance
USPS
AT&T
Boeing
FedEx
MTV
Time/Life
ESPN
Pfizer
St. Mary’s Hospital
Yahoo!
Wildlife Conservation Society
Danbury Health Systems
As Teachers, it is our job to speak. It is our responsibility to be experts in our field, to transfer the body of knowledge that sits at the core of our discipline to the next generation of practitioners. Much of the process and infrastructure of our academic programs is in support of this responsibility. Curricula, syllabi, grades; all serve to ensure that we, the Teachers, are heard and that in hearing, the students are able to take on our speech and the speech of our profession. All very valuable. And, in the context of the society and business world our students will enter, no longer sufficient.
As Educators, our job is different: our job is to listen. Not to listen for anything, but to listen to the individuals who show up in our classrooms. The work of listening to is not the work of extracting opinions from our students, of creating environments where ‘the shy’ feel comfortable giving answers. While these outcomes are certainly valuable in the context of teaching, as Educators we are accountable for something different. We are accountable for creating the kinds of space in the classroom that James Carse calls the silence of expectation, the silence in which students are not ‘retrieving’ their thoughts (which, by their nature are artifacts from the past and often the reflection of what has been said by another), but rather engaging with their thinking, their own voice, their own power of creation. I have found that students (and corporate clients for that matter) have had shockingly little access to this space, that the intense pressure to be Taught has left them with precious little awareness of what it is to be Educated.
This of course is not an either/or, Teaching or Education. Both are critical components of what we provide. However, the degree to which students find value in my classes is perhaps correlated to the degree to which I am willing to Listen, the degree to which I am willing to hold space open for the emergence of students’ voices, of their unique ‘seeing’ which will inform not the content of their work in the world but rather the context, the Meaning that only they can generate.
In the Media
A.M. Bhatt, a practitioner in residence of psychology, talks about how his nonprofit District Arts & Education teaches career and life skills as a way to give back to the New Haven community.