Matthias Birk

Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Service

Contact Details

Bio
Courses

Dr. Matthias Birk is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Service at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He is an expert on the topic of leadership and meditation and has written numerous articles on the topic. He also teaches on mindfulness and managing emotions in Columbia Business School’s Executive Education program. Matthias has held roles in leadership development at McKinsey & Co., Ralph Lauren, Goldman Sachs and currently White & Case, LLP. He has introduced executives to the practice of mindfulness at each of those organizations and also taught mindfulness and leadership to organizations such as Amazon, Google, and the United Nations. Matthias did his undergraduate in psychology at the University of Goettingen, his graduate studies in organizational psychology at the RWTH Aachen and his doctorate degree in business at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was also a visiting student at the University of California Berkeley and a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School. You can follow his work under www.matthiasbirk.com.

Courses

Spring 2023

EXEC-GP.3190.: EMPA Seminar: Leadership Confronted

Restricted to students in the Executive MPA Program.

This course is designed to create an “action learning” community in which students will integrate their professional experiences, and other graduate course work, with a final exploration of leadership concepts, theory and applied practice.

The course is designed to strengthen students’ abilities to lead, as a colleague who can support leadership behavior in peers, and as one who can promote leadership behavior in supervisors and subordinates. Specifically, as a result of their work in this course, students are expected to become:

• conversant with a broad survey of theoretical concepts and assumptions about leadership and leadership behavior;
• better navigators of the internal and external factors influencing successful leading;
• demonstrably more expert in using a variety of skills such as appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, narrative inquiry and action research, to frame and describe personal leadership challenges as a step towards increasing successful leading;
• deft in consulting with others, and receiving and providing constructive feedback; and,
• more insightful about personal leadership competencies, paradoxes and challenges. Growing out of this increased awareness, students will develop an action plan for continued development of personal leadership capabilities.

This course has been carefully designed to provide you with an opportunity to synthesize and apply leadership theory. This is an academic seminar with a significant component of experiential learning.