Donald John Trump: villain or hero?

In President Trump, we see a different sort of leader from those we have had in the past. He has not come out of the traditional political machine, having never served as a US Congressman or a Senator. He is rich, with business interests across the world. He is loud and bombastic. He has absolutely no doubts about his ability to achieve results through making deals. The question is: “What sort of a president will he be?” Has Donald Trump gone into politics in order to increase his wealth, or has he an underlying altruistic intent? Will he be caught up by the political machines and, gradually, become seduced into believing that being re-elected is the only game in town, or will he surpass all expectations to become, even if unwittingly, the most powerful agent for positive change that the world has seen in a very long time?

Douglas G Long was born in New Zealand but has lived in Australia for most of his adult life. His tertiary education was in New Zealand, Australia, England and the United States, culminating in 1985 with a PhD in Organisational Psychology.

For many years, he taught in universities in Australia and the United States, including in Melbourne, Preston Institute, David Syme Business School, RMIT Graduate School of Management; and in the USA, Drexel University. From 1988 to 2001, he was associated with Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney, where he researched, designed and delivered the programme Leadership in Senior Management. From 2002 to 2012, he was with Australia’s Southern Cross University Graduate College of Management, where he supervised doctoral candidates. Since 2013, he has taught in the Management Department of the Australian Business School at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Along with this, he has been an active consultant specialising in leadership and change with public and private sector clients throughout Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. In this role, he has facilitated some major changes undergone by very large Australian and Southeast Asian organisations. He is an accomplished public speaker and public speaking has taken him to conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Brazil and the United States.

He has been involved in community service for most of his life. For 16 years, he was a member of the St John Ambulance Brigade; and in Melbourne, after he was appointed a Justice of the Peace, he sat on the Bench at two local Magistrates’ Courts for several years. In 1983, he was brought in to coordinate the State Relief Centre operations for the disastrous Ash Wednesday bushfires in Victoria. Prior to moving to Australia, he held commissioned rank in the New Zealand Army.

Apart from Donald John Trump: Villain or Hero? The Impact of the Early Days of the Trump Presidency, he is the author of six earlier books:

Learner Managed Learning: The Key to Lifelong Learning and Development, 1990, Kogan Page.
Competitive Advantage in the 21st Century: From Vision into Action, 1993, CLS Sydney.
The Challenge of the Diamond, 1995, CLS, Sydney.
Leaders: Diamonds or Cubic Zirconia? Asia Pacific Leaders on Leadership, 1998, CLS, Sydney.
Third Generation Leadership and the Locus of Control: Knowledge, Change and Neuroscience, 2012, Gower Publications.
Delivering High Performance: The Third Generation Organisation, 2013, Gower Publications.

And a co-author of:

The Success Zone: 5 Powerful Steps for Growing Yourself and Leading Others, 2009, Global Publishing Group (with Andrew Mowat and John Corrigan).
The Ethical Kaleidoscope: Values, Ethics, and Corporate Governance, 2017, Routledge Publishing (with Zivit Inbar)