Jeffrey L. Buller is the director of Leadership and Professional Development at Florida Atlantic University and a senior partner in ATLAS Leadership Training.  He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is the author of fifteen books on academic leadership and numerous articles, including nearly two hundred on higher education administration.

Many people assume that a positive approach to leadership requires administrators to remain endlessly optimistic, always expect that things will work out for the best, and generally look at the world through rose-colored glasses.  But sometimes the most positive thing you can do as an academic leader is to envision all the things that could potentially go wrong (because more often than not they will).  In this session, we'll explore how and when to temper our optimism with a healthy dose of pessimism (and vice versa) so as to bring about the most positive outcome possible in even the most negative of situations.