Seung Chan Lim

Seung Chan Lim (Slim) helps executives achieve greater inter-personal effectiveness by helping them design their leadership behaviors through realizing empathy.

Trained in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Slim spent the first 9 years of his career at MAYA Design helping fortune 500 companies innovate through product & service design. He then spent 4 years at Rhode Island School of Design & Brown University researching how creativity, innovation, and transformational development are facilitated by visual & performing arts education. What he learned from both his consulting practice and his research into art education is that a disciplined & deliberate realization of empathy is at the heart of all creative processes and that leaders whose purpose lie in innovation are, like artists, journeying through a creative process filled with uncertainty, doubt, fear, and futility.

Based on this experience Slim has been spending the past 3 years helping willing leaders more effectively navigate their creative process by helping them leverage the inner and inter-personal conflicts present between them and others in and outside of their organization as a source of insight from which to design their leadership for greater effectiveness.

Slim was born in Seoul, Korea, only to move to Cairo, Egypt at the tender age of 6. Since then, he has enjoyed the life of a global nomad, living in two additional countries: China & the U.S. Trained first as a computer scientist, Slim spent the first 9 years of his career at MAYA Design. There, he split his time between conducting visionary research into the future of human-computer interaction and helping fortune 500 companies innovate through human-centered design. It was at MAYA Design, where he realized that the challenge in design & innovation is less about coming up with new ideas for products or services, and more about fostering a culture in which such ideas could emerge, develop, and thrive. This lead him to leave his practice to explore a culture often considered ideal for design & innovation: an art school.

For 4 years, Slim conducted research exploring the culture in which visual and performing arts flourished. He kept asking himself "what does it mean to 'make something'​ and how does it work?" What arose from this research was a unique understanding of empathy and its relationship to innovation, development, and transformation. One that helped Slim con