Alexandre Havard

Alexandre Havard is the author of Virtuous Leadership — An Agenda for Personal Excellence (New York: Scepter Publishers, 2007). He is also the founder of the European Center for Leadership Development (ECLD), which promotes the classical virtues as the basis of effective leadership. It does so primarily through the mounting of leadership seminars that draw heavily on the Virtuous Leadership model set forth in Mr. Havard’s book of the same name.

Born in France, Mr. Havard is a lawyer who has practiced in Strasbourg, and Helsinki. Since 2007, he has been living and working in Moscow, where he represents the ECLD network and offers the Virtuous Leadership seminars to private and public sector executives and members of the academic and educational communities.

Mr. Havard's father, Cyril Havard (1929-), is the son of Russian emigrants, Pavel Havard-Dianin (1903-1980) and Nina Anossova (1903-1998), who fled Saint Petersburg during the Bolshevik Revolution and settled, in the early 1920s, in Paris. There, they met and eventually married. His mother, Irene Gedevanishvili (1938-), is the daughter of Artchil Gedevanishvili (1897-1970), a Georgian aristocrat, who left the Soviet Union in 1926. He settled in Paris where he married Madeleine Ducrocq (1898-1975), the daughter of a French general.

Mr. Havard studied law in Paris at the Paris Descartes University (1981-1986) and served as a barrister in Strasbourg (1987-1989). In 1989, he moved to Helsinki where he practiced law and lectured on European law and European Union integration.

On September 9, 2004, Mr. Havard founded the European Center for Leadership Development (ECLD), a Helsinki-based, Finnish corporation dedicated to promoting the classical virtues as the basis for effective leadership and personal excellence. In June 2007, Mr. Havard moved to Moscow. In October of that year, his book — Virtuous Leadership - An Agenda for Personal Excellence — was published in New York. Now in its third printing in English, it has also been translated into Chinese, Russian, French, Polish, Spanish and other languages.

In 2007, the European Center for Leadership Development (ECLD) became an international network of consultants dedicated to spreading the virtuous leadership model as set forth in Mr. Havard’s book, Virtuous Leadership – An Agenda for Personal Excellence. This it does largely through offering its flagship executive program—Virtuous Leadership—to executives on a global basis.

fi:Alexandre Havard