Virtual Coach, Virtual Mentor. Edited by David Clutterbuck & Zulfi Hussain

In the case of virtual coaching and mentoring (or e-mentoring and ecoaching; or coaching/mentoring by wire-choose your own preferred nomenclature!) there are hundreds, perhapsthousands of programs and initiatives across the world. Yet there is comparatively little in theway of comparison of good practice or academic evaluation of what does and doesn't work.We found numerous individual case studies but a dearth of empirical research and no significantcollection of cases to illustrate the diversity of applications.Virtual Coach, Virtual Mentor provides a wide variety of perspectives on a rapidly growingphenomenon. We hope and intend that it should make a timely and significant contribution togood practice and to encouraging more practitioners and their clients and more organizationsto experiment with using electronic media to enrich coaching and mentoring. The view of ecoachingand e-mentoring is firmly one that these new media are less a replacement for traditionalface-to-face than an enhancement of learning alliances in general. We see no evidence offewer face-to-face coaching or mentoring relationships-on the contrary, they continue to become more popular and widespread.Rather, we see that virtual coaching and mentoring both enrich predominantly face-to-face relationships, by connecting partners attimes between formal meetings, and open up coaching and mentoring to new audiences and new applications.