A brand-new interview is now available at ADR All-Stars.

This one features Ashok Panikkar, founder of Meta-Culture, India’s first conflict management consulting group. Ashok traces his cross-continental journey as a dispute resolution professional, describes the far-reaching mission of his ambitious new enterprise, discusses the state of the ADR field in India, and shares advice on communicating successfully in cross-cultural settings (and, for those of you interested in pursuing a career in ADR, even discusses job opportunities as well).

For the full text of the interview, please click here.

About a week ago I launched a new feature, “ADR All-Stars”–interviews with those larger-than-life individuals who have made important contributions to the ADR field, have justifiably earned recognition and renown, or who are creative groundbreakers, pushing the limits of ADR practice in innovative ways.

Since I like to give these all-stars free rein to share their ideas and their strategies for success without the constraints of staying within an arbitrary and inflexible 500-or-so-word limit, I quickly discovered that it’s easy for these interviews to exceed the length of your average blog post.

Therefore, to allow my all-stars the space they deserve to express themselves, I’ve created a separate blog, called, unsurprisingly, ADR All-Stars. And I’ll add posts here at Online Guide to Mediation to announce when new interviews are published and provide a link to the full interview at the ADR All-Stars site.

ADR All-Stars as a concept was born out of my love for sports. Massachusetts, which is where I live and work, is a great place for sports lovers. Just in case you missed the excitement last year or aren’t from the U.S., we had one team win last year’s World Series (that’s baseball, for those of you who live outside North America–and why they call it the World Series when only the U.S. and Canada are eligible to compete is beyond me, so don’t ask) and another team win the Super Bowl (an American football championship, for those of you not familiar with U.S. sports events, and a national obsession).

My original concept was to create baseball-style trading cards with ADR professionals on them instead of baseball players (I was inspired by the Librarian Action Figure and trading card).

What stopped me was my utter lack of graphics design talent and the sad realization that nobody but other ADR professionals would be interested.

In fact, probably not even other ADR professionals.

In the end, blogging just seemed an easier way to showcase the talents of some truly extraordinary dispute resolvers.

Last week I featured an interview with Red Sox fan and expert mediator Ericka Gray of DisputEd here in Boston.

My next interview, which will be posted by tomorrow, takes us all the way to Bangalore to meet innovator Ashok Panikkar, who has just founded Meta-Culture, India’s first integrated conflict management consulting group.