Coaching and mentoring are for all intents and purposes teaching tools and techniques. In the classroom, first-rate teaching entails more than just imparting facts and figures, although that's very important. Inspired teaching — both in school settings and in the workplace — is really about stimulating students to desire learning on their own. The best educators plant the seeds of learning and hope that they get enough water and sunshine over time to sprout and grow trees of knowledge.

The principal mission of this book is to reveal coaching and mentoring and their increasingly important role in the business sphere, as well as in offices in the sprawling public sector of the economy. Until relatively recently (let's say before 1990), the workplace was clearly differentiated from “home sweet home.” It was a rigidly structured environment — almost antiseptic in its activities and schedules.

Generally speaking, the boss was the boss and you did what you were told to do. You performed your everyday workload and went home near suppertime. And maybe — in time — you became the boss.

That was then and this is now — the twenty-first century.

For the preponderance of the twentieth century, it was not unusual for a man or woman to labor in one job — and one job only — for an entire working life. It happened all the time: Young, wet-behind-the-ears adults graduated from high school or college, found work with a company, and were still around for their retirement parties forty and fifty years later. And for their longstanding and loyal toiling, they received engraved wristwatches and pensions to live on until the Grim Reaper came calling.

Indeed, these dedicated souls, who stayed in one place from the beginning to the end of their working life, were once upon a time lauded for their steadfastness and allegiance to the companies that employed them. And, in turn, many of these employers reciprocated this dedication by not casting them aside when they sprouted their first gray hairs. It is an epoch that is long gone.