Jose Gonzalez, Founder and Director, Semilla Inc.

Doug Fike has been observing and interpreting his own and his many leader-friends’ experiences all of his adult life.  He has had, of necessity, senior mentors all along, drawing from them the marrow of their leadership experience, passionately processing how a leader becomes one—and lives and passes through the transitions and seasons of life. 

I have not encountered, in my own twenty years serving civic, religious and academic leaders in my world (Latin and North America) a more incisive, intuitive, creative and compassionate student and teacher of leadership.  His insights about leaders are matched by an unusual instinct about what organizations should do as they both prepare for or catch up with inevitable transitions.  

For example, Doug helped me turn a Latin American Leadership Program I lead at Regent University, from a professional to a transformational tool.  More importantly, he persuaded me and accompanied me through a year-long sabbatical process, without which that transition would have been impossible.   

Fortunately (for some), Doug has not taken yet to writing books.  For now he rather walks alongside leaders and organizations ….  When the books come, as they inevitably will, his legacy will have already been written in the lives of the hundreds of leaders and organizations worldwide, whose lives, like mine and some of my partners—from the US to Cuba, El Salvador, and Paraguay—have been permanently marked.