Second edition of this bestselling book on creating robust, thriving, positive communities using seven ancient principles any organization can follow.

Now with 25% new content, including a chapter on building virtual communities.

Healthy communities strive for their members to support one another, share their passions, and achieve personal growth. This book will help you learn to be connected and defeat loneliness by understanding where and how we belong. No matter the kind of organization, company, or social group, this book is a guide for leaders seeking to build a community or strengthen the ones they already have.

Drawing on both 3,000 years of history and his personal experience, Charles Vogl lays out seven time-tested principles for developing connected communities that last. These include:
•Boundary: The boundary between members and outsiders
•Initiation: The activities that mark a new member
•Rituals: The things we do that have meaning
•Temple: A place set aside to find our community
•Stories: What we share that allows others and ourselves to know our values
•Symbols: The things that represent ideas that are important to us
•Inner Rings: A path to growth as we participate

With hands-on tools for applying these principles to any group-formal or informal, mission driven or social, physical or virtual-this book will guide you in your journey to become a community builder that brings people together

Outlines a new leadership approach tailored to the realities of the 21st Century.

No organizational leaders can succeed in today’s fast evolving and highly connected world on their own. To succeed, today’s leaders must not only optimize all their own faculties—mental sharpness, emotional depth, imagination, and creativity—but also utilize the full capacities of those around them in a collaborative and creative manner. The prestigious contributors to this volume draw on psychology, sociology, neuroscience, social networking theory, organizational change theory, myths and traditions, and actual experiences to discover how leaders today achieve transformational results. The Transforming Leader offers an overview of what transformational leadership is, how it works, and how it is evolving. In doing so it reframes the challenge of leading in today’s interdependent, unpredictable world.

• Outlines a new leadership approach tailored to the realities of the twenty-first century

• Features chapters by such leading authors as Matthew Fox, Diana Whitney, and Alan Briskin

• Edited and annotated by the author of the bestselling The Hero Within

 

The traditional model of the heroic leader single-handedly piloting the organization was always something of a myth, but it is especially unrealistic now. We live in a complex, fast-evolving, highly connected world. There is simply too much for a single person to keep track of or to address successfully. Leaders today must not only optimize all their own facultiesmind, body, and spiritthey must harvest the full capacities of those around them.

To discover what leadership models are working now, the prestigious Fetzer Institute, along with the University of Marylands School of Public Policy, and the International Leadership Association, brought together an impressive, interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners. The group drew on psychology, sociology, neuroscience, organizational change theory, myths and wisdom traditions, social networking theory, and the actual experiences of successful leaders to discover how leaders today achieve transformational results.

The first part of the book offers an overview of what transformational leadership is, how it works, and how it is evolving. The second part shows readers how to increase cognitive complexity, link up their conscious and unconscious minds, and lead in ways that connect mind, heart, and spirit. The third part describes ways of leading groups to harvest collective wisdom and promote coordinated performance in the service of transformational ends. The conclusion explores how transformational communication can anchor new learnings so that they become habitual.

Overall, The Transforming Leader reframes the challenge of leading in todays interdependent, unpredictable world. Its message is that if we update our thinking, enhance the quality of our being, deepen our sense of relatedness with the ecology of our natural and social worlds, and practice transformational communication, things no longer have to be so hard. 

Political parties and elections are increasingly political theatre, with real power hidden behind a smokescreen of propaganda, carefully manipulated cultural and religious wars, and voting rituals. But there is another kind of hidden power in America: the grassroots social movements working for progressive change. If the Democratic Party can ally with these movements, America can be returned to its people. Derber sees American history as a succession of regimes, each spanning several administrations. Since the end of the Civil War, regimes of hidden power, in which corporate interests control both parties behind the scenes, have alternated with more open, inclusive and democratic regimes. Derber details how and why these hidden power systems finally collapsed and what determined the types of regimes that succeeded them. Hidden Power reveals how the current regime, possibly the most corporate in history, has maintained power by intensifying the red/blue culture wars, supporting religious extremists, exploiting terrorism fears, and manipulating the electoral process. Will this latest corporate regime be replaced by one that is more progressive? Or it could turn even further right and yield to something even worse, a uniquely American form of fascism? The best hope for positive change lies in an alliance between the Democratic Party and the grass roots progressive movements that, Derber shows, have always been the catalysts for change. Hidden Power concludes with an impassioned argument for why this would be in the Democrats' best interests, as well as the country's, and a detailed program for exactly how to go about it. Thoughtful, eloquent, and compelling, Hidden Power offers real hope for restoring genuine democracy to America.

• Presents an original analysis of what the real sources of power are in America today
• Reveals the tactics used by corporate interests to wield hidden power
• Offers detailed strategic advice for how the Democrats can unite with grassroots social movements and form a powerful coalition for fundamental change
• Thom Hartmann, Air America radio host and bestselling author of Screwed, says "Hidden Power is the must-read book of the year. Buy three copies, at least, because you'll want to share a few with friends, and will never want to part with your own well-marked-up copy." read the full review

" We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "

Proven, Profitable, and Sustainable

For the past fifty years, leaders in the business world have believed that their sole responsibility is to maximize profit for shareholders. But this obsessive focus was a major cause of the abuses that nearly sunk the global economy in 2008. In this analytically rigorous and eminently practical book, Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub offer a more complete form of capitalism, one that delivers superior financial performance precisely because it mobilizes and generates human, social, and natural capital along with financial capital. They describe how the model has been implemented in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Recent high-profile books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed financial capitalism's shortcomings, but this book goes far beyond by describing a well-developed, field-tested alternative.

Peter Georgescu arrived in this country as a penniless Romanian refugee and rose to become the CEO of Young & Rubicam. This is why he's so heartsick that with flat wages, disappearing jobs, and a shrinking middle class, his kind of rags-to-riches story doesn't seem possible now. But he has a message for his fellow CEOs: we're the ones who must take the lead in fixing the economy.

Marshaling deeply sobering statistics, Georgescu depicts the stark reality of America today: a nation with greater wealth inequality and lower social mobility than just about any other country in the developed world. But the problem isn't that free-market capitalism no longer works—it's that it's been hijacked by shareholder primacy. Where once our business leaders looked to the needs and interests of a variety of stakeholders—employees, community members, the business itself—now they're myopically focused on maximizing their shareholders' quarterly returns.

Capitalists, Arise! shows how the short-term thinking spawned by shareholder primacy lies at the root of our current economic malaise and social breakdown. But Georgescu offers concrete actions that capitalists themselves can take to create a better future. The irony is that if businesses do this, shareholders will do even better. In the long run, businesses can thrive only when society is healthy and strong. This book is a manifesto calling on capitalists to heal the nation that has given them so much.