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Leadership expert and best-selling author Jim Kouzes, of Orinda, California, has been selected as the 2006 recipient of Toastmasters International's Golden Gavel Award.

Kouzes is an executive fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Northern California. He is best known for co-authoring many award-winning books with his colleague Barry Posner, primarily The Leadership Challenge, which is now in its third edition and available in 17 languages. The team's success with The Leadership Challenge prompted them to create the Leadership Practices Inventory, (LPI), which Kouzes describes as a "360-degree questionnaire assessing leadership behavior." Their newest book, A Leader's Legacy, will be released this fall.

The Golden Gavel is the most prestigious award offered by Toastmasters International, a worldwide organization devoted to teaching public speaking and leadership skills. The award has been presented once a year since 1959 to a distinguished individual in the fields of communication and leadership. Past recipients include Walter Cronkite, Earl Nightingale, Rev. Robert Schuller, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Zig Ziglar, Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Debbi Fields, Deepak Chopra, Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard and Marcus Buckingham.

Mr. Kouzes will accept the award at a luncheon in his honor on Thursday, August 24 during Toastmasters International Convention in Washington D.C. He is a popular seminar and conference speaker who Wall Street Journal called "one of 12 most requested non-university executive education providers to U.S. companies."

Toastmasters International has helped more than four million people become better speakers since the organization's founding in 1924 at the YMCA in Santa Ana, Calif. Today, Toastmasters International has more than 200,000 members in 10,000 clubs in 90 countries, including several hundred clubs in the Bay Area alone.

SOURCE: Toastmasters International

Web site: http://www.toastmasters.org/