Collective Leadership

A nonprofit manager's fundamental job is to get results, sustained over time, rather than boost morale or promote staff development. This is a shift from the tenor of many management books, particularly in the nonprofit world. Managing to Change the World is designed to teach new and experienced nonprofit managers the fundamental skills of effective management, including: managing specific tasks and broader responsibilities; setting clear goals and holding people accountable to them; creating a results-oriented culture; hiring, developing, and retaining a staff of superstars.

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism, delivered to produce better results and help employees develop their skills and boundaries of success.

In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journey designed to help us answer these very questions. And not just generally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work provides you with the tools to create a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.

The Four Disciplines of Execution is about a simple, proven formula for reaching the goals you want to reach as a business or individual. In Covey's experience, the thing that most undermines the ability to execute goals is what he calls the Whirlwind: those urgent tasks that must be done simply to keep an organization alive. As Covey shows, the only way to execute new, important goals is to separate those goals from the Whirlwind.

The book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Lalou explores how to reimagine what’s possible in organizations.

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.

In traditional companies, managers make decisions, and workers execute the plan. But Holacracy is a revolutionary and tried-and-tested new system which turns everyone into a leader. The organization looks like a nest of circles, not a pyramid -- but it's not anarchy. In Holacracy, pioneer Brian Robertson explains how to adopt this system across your organization -- and what you can do just within your department or for yourself -- and how to overcome any obstacles along the way.

Heifetz, Linsky, and coauthor Alexander Grashow are taking the next step: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a hands-on, practical guide containing stories, tools, diagrams, cases, and worksheets to help you develop your skills as an adaptive leader, able to take people outside their comfort zones and assess and address the toughest challenges.

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.

With their Immunity to Change method, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey have guided a generation of adult leaders to overcome barriers, find new solutions, and embrace the change they want to make.

Author and consultant Jennifer Garvey Berger has worked with all types of leaders―from top executives at Google to nonprofit directors who are trying to make a dent in social change. She hears a version of the same plea from every client in nearly every sector around the world: "I know that complexity and uncertainty are testing my instincts, but I don't know which to trust. Is there some way to know what to do when I can't know what's next?" Using her background in adult development, complexity theories, and leadership consultancy, Garvey Berger discerns five pernicious and pervasive “mind traps” to frame the book.

Leadership is not about titles, status and power over people. Leaders are people who hold themselves accountable for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and developing that potential. This is a book for everyone who is ready to choose courage over comfort, make a difference and lead. When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it and work to align authority and accountability. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into the vulnerability that’s necessary to do good work.

From the bestselling author of Mo’ Meta Blues and James Beard Award nominated Something to Food About. A unique new guide to creativity from Questlove — inspirations, stories, and lessons on how to live your best creative life.

Discussions about leadership, even those centered on women, often overlook contributions made by Asian and Asian North American women. Now, Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim share stories of Asian and Asian North American women who found their ways, sometimes circuitously, sometimes unexpectedly, into leadership roles. Leading Wisdom challenges conventional understanding through its creative reimagining of what it means to lead.

In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence and informed heart that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach. Here he speaks to our yearning to live undivided lives—lives that are congruent with our inner truth—in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation.

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. 

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.

In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country.

The main theme of the book which is made up of selections from Nkrumah's speeches linked by his own narrative is Ghana's independence: political freedom followed by economic development and social regeneration. But as an ardent proponent of African unity Nkurmah sees the independence of Ghana as incomplete unless it is linked up with the liberation of other territories in Africa

In this inspiring and beautifully illustrated book, best-selling author Margaret Wheatley offers guidance to people everywhere for how to persevere through challenges in their personal lives, with their families, at their workplaces, in their communities, and in their efforts to make a better world.

Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.