Change is everywhere these days—at times it seems like barely controlled chaos. Yet within this turmoil are the seeds of a higher order. When a new system arises from the ashes of the old, science calls the process “emergence.” By engaging it, you can help yourself and your organization or community to successfully face disruption and emerge stronger than ever.

In this profound book, Peggy Holman offers principles, practices, and real-world stories to help you work with compassion, creativity, and wisdom through the entire arc of change—from disruption to coherence. You'll learn what to notice, what to explore, what to try, and what mindset opens new possibilities.

This work can be challenging but also tremendously rewarding. It enables new and unlikely partnerships and develops breakthrough projects. You become part of a process that transforms the culture itself.

• Shows how to spot the emergence of a new level of order from the seemingly chaotic change that characterizes modern times

• Offers practices and principles that will help you align yourself and your organization with the new order

• Features real-world examples of individuals and organizations that have successfully navigated disruptive change

• 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal in the category of Conscious Business/Leadership

 

Change is everywhere these days, so much so that it can seem like barely-controlled chaos. As a result, increasing numbers of leaders, managers, workers and change agents feel overwhelmed. Some see too many choices, while others see no choices at all. But sometimes within this seeming chaos are the seeds of a higher order.  Science calls the process of a new system arising from the ashes of the old emergence. Understanding the phenomenon of emergence can help leaders to gracefully and successfully cope with change and emerge stronger and more purposeful. 

In this profound and insightful book, Peggy Holman offers new ways to think about the potential upheaval contains as a source of emergent change and shows how to engage it productively. This is is an art more than a science, so Holman offers practices that tell you not precisely what to do but rather how to approach disruptive situationswhat to notice, what to explore, what to try, what mindset will leave you most open to identifying the new paradigm as it emerges. She grounds these practices in five overarching principles that apply the scientific understanding of emergence in the natural world to social and organizational change processes. Real-world stories of collapse and renewal serve to illustrate these principles and practices in action. And Holman outlines three questions to help you work compassionately, creatively and wisely with the entire arc of the change process, from coherence to disruption to renewal.

This work can be difficultthe end is rarely in sight and the outcome is often uncertain. But it can also be tremendously exciting. Our survival in an increasingly unpredictable world is at stake, and working consciously with emergence is a promising pathway to doing something about it.

Philanthropic NGOs, foundations, and corporations face endlessly competing needs when deciding to invest or donate for maximum social impact. This book fills an enormous gap by providing a system to measure, operationalize, and improve any organization's impact investments.Philanthropic NGOs, foundations, and corporations face endlessly competing needs when deciding to invest or donate for maximum social impact. This book fills an enormous gap by providing a system to measure, operationalize, and improve any organization's impact investments.

• Cowritten by the author of Making Sustainability Work , a book that revolutionized best practices in sustainability and has been widely adopted in boardrooms and classrooms
• Offers a detailed, reliable, and proven approach to rigorously evaluating and increasing the social impact of philanthropic efforts
• Based on interviews with over sixty foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and investment firms and filled with real-life examples

The world is beset with enormous problems that desperately need solutions. And as a nonprofit, NGO, foundation, impact investor, or socially responsible company, your organization is on a mission to provide those solutions.

But what exactly should you do? And how will you know whether it's working? Too many people assume that good intentions will result in meaningful actions and leave it at that. But thanks to Marc Epstein and Kristi Yuthas, social impact can now be evaluated with the same kind of precision achieved for any other organizational function.

Based on years of research and analysis of field studies from around the globe, Epstein and Yuthas offer a five-step process that will help you gain clarity about the impacts that matter most to you and will provide you with methods to measure and improve those impacts. They offer a systematic approach to deciding what resources you should invest, what problem you should address, and which activities and organizations you should support. Once you've made those decisions, they provide tools, frameworks, and metrics for defining exactly what success looks like, even for goals like reducing global warming or poverty that are extremely difficult to measure. Then they show you how to use the data you've gathered to further develop and increase your social impact.

Epstein and Yuthas personally interviewed leaders at over sixty different organizations for this book and include examples from nearly a hundred more. This is unquestionably the most complete, practical, and thoroughly researched guide to taking a rigorous, data-driven approach to expanding the good you do in the world. 

Design and cultivate remote work teams that actually work.

From the experts who brought you The Long-Distance Leader and The Long-Distance Teammate comes the proven and practical guide for leaders to consciously design teams, define and create their desired culture, and encourage and nurture employee engagement-all from a distance.

Team design and culture are often presented as separate concepts when they are in fact intertwined in the remote work setting. Using the 3C model of communication, collaboration, and cohesion, leaders will be given the tools to overcome challenges, such as proximity bias and deteriorating social connections, to create an environment where everyone can contribute and add value equally, regardless of location.

The 3Cs are

Communication-While communication is a fundamental part of being human, it is also a critical foundation of successful work. Without it, teams break down.

Collaboration-Remote leaders face the misguided belief that physical presence is required to have a collaborative team. The truth is that proximity has nothing to do with successful collaboration.

Cohesion-This dimension includes decidedly nonstructural aspects, such as relationships, trust, and accountability. While difficult to measure, a team's cohesion is critical to its success.

Using this framework, leaders of all levels will learn to assess, design, and develop their communication channels, methods for remote collaboration, and ability to foster cohesion to build successful long-distance teams. While a hybrid culture will be different, it can, when done right, be better than what existed before.

People often ask, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we solve global hunger?"

• Offers a more dynamic, powerful, and practical way to address difficult social problems than the dominant planning approach
• Features inspiring examples of the results social labs around the world have achieved
• Provides detailed guidance on how to start a social lab in any setting and on any level

People often ask, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we solve global hunger?" That very question demonstrates the fatal flaw in the dominant way of dealing with difficult social challenges: they're treated like straightforward technical problems. Organizations do a few studies, establish some goals, devise a plan, and attempt implementation. As a look around the world sadly shows, this hasn't worked.

Issues like poverty, ethnic conflict, and climate change are incredibly dynamic and complex, involving an ever-shifting array of factors, actors, and circumstances. They demand a more fluid and adaptive approach. The answer, says Zaid Hassan, is social labs.

Social labs bring together a diverse a group of stakeholders not to create yet more five-year plans but to develop a portfolio of prototype solutions, test those solutions in the real world, use the data to further refine them, and test them again. Their orientation is systemic-they are designed to go beyond dealing with symptoms and parts to get at the root cause of why things are not working.

Hassan builds on a decade of experience-as well as drawing from cutting-edge research in complexity science, networking theory, and sociology-to explain the core principles and daily functioning of social labs, using examples of pioneering labs from around the world. He describes a fast-growing global movement around a new generation of ambitious social labs that are tackling big challenges such as dramatically reducing global emissions, preventing the collapse of fragile states, and improving community resilience. The Social Labs Revolution offers a new generation of problem solvers an effective, practical, and exciting new vision and guide.

o How to embody the values of service, truth, and personal responsibility in leadership roles
o Insights about management, leadership, and purpose from a successful businessman and perceptive student of Gandhi's life and writings

Though Gandhi is one of the most written-about figures of the twentieth century, this is the first book to apply lessons from his life to the practical tasks faced by contemporary leaders-from corporate managers and executives to government administrators, nonprofit professionals, educators, and others.

In times shaped by colonialism, dictatorships, and two World Wars, Gandhi demonstrated that an idealist could also be a practical and effective leader. In our times of increasing cynicism about the quality of leadership we can expect and aspire to, Keshavan Nair reminds us that, "We are all engaged in leadership, in practicing it and selecting those who will lead." In A Higher Standard of Leadership, he offers a pragmatic guide based on the concepts Gandhi exemplified:
o leadership is service, not a path to power and privilege;
o effective goals, decisions, and strategies can be guided by moral principles;
o a single standard of conduct, based on absolute values, should be maintained in both public and private life.

A lifelong student of Gandhi's teachings and a businessman with more than 25 years of experience in corporate and governmental leadership development, Nair is uniquely positioned to bridge the two worlds. Using illustrative examples from Gandhi's life and writings, he identifies commitments-to conscience, openness, service, values, and reduced attachments-and describes the courage and determination necessary to work and lead by them. In simple and direct language, he explores the process of making decisions, setting goals, and implementing actions guided by the spirit of service and commitment to values that is essential to the realization of a higher standard of leadership in our workplaces and communities.

• Shows America's economic system to be at odds with its social and political goals and proposes a system designed to increase personal freedom
• Questions the most basic assumptions that drive our economic system, and argues that its entire structure must be challenged

50% of the U.S. population aged 40 and older test out to be introverts, as do 40% of top executives. Kahnweiler's The Introverted Leader is the first book to offer this staggeringly large audience the tools to effectively deal with a common disposition. It offers many ways for people to turn their shyness into leadership strengths and advantages.In our outgoing, type A business culture, introverts can feel excluded, overlooked, or misunderstood, their reticence mistaken for reluctance, arrogance, or even lack of intelligence. But Jennifer Kahnweiler shows that not only can introversion be managed, it can even be a source of strength. Ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the leaders she cites as shy introspectives who have developed ways to thrive in a challenging environment.

It is estimated that as many as 40 per cent of executives are introverted to at least some extent. Based on conversations with over 100 of these men and women, Kahnweiler lays out a progressive four-step strategy for succeeding in an extroverted world. First, preparation: carefully devise a game plan for any potentially anxiety-producing situation. Then presence: knowing that you're prepared, be completely focused on the present moment or activity. Next, push: with a firm foundation of preparation and presence, go beyond your comfort zone. And finally, practice, practice, practice.

After a revealing Introverted Leader Quiz to help you deepen your understanding of where focused improvement will produce maximum results, Kahnweiler shows exactly how to apply the four P's approach in six areas that are particularly difficult for introverts, such as public speaking, heading up projects, participating in meetings, and more. The goal, she emphasizes, is not personality change—you work with who you are, not against it. In fact, she shows that introversion can actually be a plus in areas like listening skills and written communication. But as a result of reading this book, leaders and aspiring leaders who find it intimidating to be around people will learn to embrace the experience, rather than see it as something to be avoided or endured, and as a result advance their careers and contribute more fully to their organizations.