The Leadership Classroom
Iris S. King & Dr. Terry Oroszi
Colin Powell · The Capstone
Ten leaders, ten real leadership styles.
Visionary, pacesetting, coaching, coalition, nonviolent, crisis, persuasive: real leadership theory taught by the people who actually lived it. Ask any of them how they led, why it worked, and what it cost. Bring several to one table and watch entirely different leadership philosophies argue it out.
Download the FlyerThe Ten Leaders
Visionary, pacesetting, coaching, coalition, nonviolent, crisis, persuasive: real leadership theory taught by the people who actually lived it. Each portrait below is tagged with the style that leader teaches.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Visionary Leadership
Refused to trust a single source, and helped the world agree on its first shared list of human rights.
Marie Curie
Pacesetting Leadership
A personal standard so relentless it won two Nobel Prizes, and cost her, and her daughter, their health.
John Wooden
Coaching Leadership
Won ten national championships by refusing to mention winning at all.
Frances Perkins
Democratic & Coalition Leadership
The first woman in a U.S. Cabinet, who spent twelve years building the coalition that created Social Security.
Mohandas Gandhi
Affiliative & Nonviolent Leadership
Turned truth and self-suffering into a weapon strong enough to move an empire.
Coretta Scott King
Affiliative & Nonviolent Leadership
A movement leader and institution builder in her own right, not only Martin's wife.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Nonviolent & Persuasive Leadership
Turned the discipline of nonviolence into a strategy that could win, and stayed in dialogue with people who wanted him silenced.
Harriet Tubman
Crisis & Commanding Leadership
Never lost a passenger, and never let one turn back.
Ernest Shackleton
Crisis & Commanding Leadership
The goal changed the moment the ice took the ship. Getting every man home became the only mission that mattered.
Sojourner Truth
Persuasive Rhetoric
Turned her own body and story into unanswerable argument.
Or bring them to one table.
The Leadership Table: pick 2 to 6 of these ten, any combination, and watch them answer you and each other. A director model decides who speaks next, so it plays out like a real seminar, not a scripted rotation.
Meet Your TA
Iris usually runs the front desk for the whole lab. For this course, she's on loan as teaching assistant, the person to ask when you're not sure how something in this classroom works. She doesn't teach leadership theory, that's Ask Dr. O and the ten leaders above.
Ask Dr. O
A professionally-scoped faculty twin for course-material questions between sessions, grounded only in Dr. Oroszi's real, public professional record. Solo only, not part of the leader table above.
The Capstone
Colin Powell closes the course in Week 15: the soldier and statesman whose own rules for leadership begin with admitting when you got it wrong. Solo only, the closing conversation after the ten leaders above.
Course Schedule
PTX 7006, Leadership Theory and Application. Fifteen weeks, built around the ten leaders above plus assigned readings from Dr. Oroszi's Forbes Technology Council series on AI and human judgment.
Learning Objectives
- Gain insight on how to lead others, particularly individuals who function differently than themselves.
- Learn how to give bad news with kindness.
- Pay equal attention to verbal and nonverbal cues to lead more effectively.
- Develop public speaking skills that leave students always prepared.
Learning Outcomes
- Learn how to self-evaluate, the first step to becoming a successful leader.
- Understand how AI agents and decision-support tools are entering leadership practice, and build sound judgment about when to rely on them and when not to.
- Prepare for long-term professional success.
Course Launch
Orientation
Syllabus, expectations, and ETL Leadership Classroom orientation. Meet the AI Teaching Assistant and Ask Dr. O.
Marie Curie
Pacesetting Leadership
Relentless standards, and where the style burns people out.
Frances Perkins
Democratic and Coalition Leadership
ETL Module 1: Elevator Speech, Part 1 (draft and workshop).
Gandhi, Coretta Scott King, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Affiliative and Nonviolent Leadership roundtable
ETL Module 2: Egos at the Table.
AI Agents and Leadership
Build Your Own Agent introduced
Judgment in AI-supported decision-making. Reading: Dr. Oroszi, "The Three Bears of AI, What Goldilocks Can Teach About Using AI Just Right," Forbes Technology Council.
Harriet Tubman and Ernest Shackleton
Crisis and Commanding Leadership roundtable
Decision-making under extreme stakes.
Tubman and Shackleton, continued
Crisis and Commanding Leadership roundtable
Decision-making under extreme stakes, continued.
Sojourner Truth
Persuasive Rhetoric
Difficult Conversations exercise: delivering bad news with kindness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Persuasive rhetoric under pressure
Staying in dialogue with opposition.
Case Study Studio
ETL Module 5: Academic Poster / Executive Briefing.
CV Workshop
ETL Module 6: Job Fair Mastery / Networking Mastery.
Colin Powell: Capstone, Service Leadership
Putting it all together, a career of hard decisions. ETL Leadership Certificate issued; final elevator speech with guest; student agent presentations.
About this classroom. Ten real historical leaders, each teaching a distinct, real leadership style, and a professionally-scoped faculty twin for course-material questions. Every leader agent has genuine, real-time access to sources and never fabricates a fact or a quote; if a lookup fails, they say so plainly.
Some of these leaders knew each other in real life, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins were real, longtime friends and allies; Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr. were married; Martin Luther King Jr. studied Gandhi's writings closely and traveled to India to learn from his followers. Others, like Harriet Tubman and Ernest Shackleton, never met and are paired here purely by theme, for comparing leadership method under extreme stakes. Every agent is built to be honest about exactly which connections are real.