▶ Clark Aldrich
"Why can't schools teach leadership?" This single question has motivated Clark Aldrich for three decades, down a path that, along the way, resulted in him being a leading voice and pioneering practitioner in experiential learning and leadership and culture development, and whose work has shaped major trends in education, training, and simulation-based learning worldwide.
His newest pedagogy, Socratic Cards (2026), represents one conclusion of this career-long mission. By blending Socratic dialogues, game mechanics, peer feedback, reflection, mentorship, and real-world challenges, Socratic Cards transforms leadership development from passive instruction into a heroic journey of growth—all in an elegant format that does not rely on a traditional educational infrastructure.
His previous breakthrough pedagogy, Short Sims, became an industry standard, with customers ranging from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to the U.S. Department of State, Gates Foundation, ETS, Moody’s, KPMG, and the Center for Army Leadership. His sixth book, Short Sims: A Game Changer (2020), documented his scalable method for teaching people in their natural language of “learning to do,” not the academic language of “learning to know,” as demonstrated in his popular off-the-shelf Leadership for New Managers Short Sims suite.
Earlier, Aldrich helped pioneer learner-centric education through Unschooling Rules (2011), a book now associated with the rise of modern microschools and alternative education models. The book made Charles Koch’s list of recommended reading and was cited by Barack Obama.
Aldrich is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern simulation- and game-based learning. His award winning books Simulations and the Future of Learning (2003), Learning by Doing (2004) and The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games (2009) helped define the field and launch the broader gamification movement in education and training. Over his career, he has designed more than 100 educational simulations and serious games and earned a U.S. patent for leadership simulation design through his work on Virtual Leader, which also received “Best Product of the Year” honors from ASTD (now ATD).
Before that, Aldrich founded Gartner’s e-learning research and advisory services in the late 1990s, helping define the modern corporate learning industry and advising many of the world’s largest organizations during the first wave of digital learning transformation.
Aldrich also works directly with accomplished leaders at the top of their fields in the real world, including many years with the senior leadership of Xerox (where he worked closely with Ursula Burns, who stepped down as CEO in 2016); with dozens of CIOs while at his Fifth Avenue office at Research Board; on the NSA board where he held Top Secret clearance; and most recently with Heroic-organization genius Jeff Sandefer.
Across his career, Aldrich’s innovations and thought leadership have earned multiple industry “Best of the Year” awards and extensive media coverage, including The New York Times, Fortune, CNN, Wired, NPR, CBS, ABC, USA Today, and BusinessWeek. He has been called a “guru” by Fortune magazine and a “maverick” by CNN. His books and frameworks have been taught from undergraduate classrooms to doctoral programs, and he has guest lectured at institutions including Harvard, the Army War College, the Naval War College, and the FBI Academy at Quantico. He has been featured on the cover of leading industry magazines, and been included on multiple "top of the profession" lists. Aldrich holds a degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University.