Manifesting Love at Work
In an insightful excerpt from 'Shakti Leadership: Embracing the Feminine and Masculine Power in Business', authors Nilma Bhat and Raj Sisodian express the innovative concept of brining caring and love into the workplace. Conscious companies are embracing this form of leadership, as CEO's of different companies speak about how to manifest love in a capitalist business world, whilst still being succ... posted on Feb 19, 6359 reads

Elie Wiesel on How Our Questions Unite Us
What do leadership and loneliness have in common? What is the difference between solitude and isolation? How might we live through to the other side the intense feelings of being alone that can come upon us? Maria Popova explores these rich and subtle questions in this Brain Pickings article. She delves into a rare essay, "The Loneliness of Leadership" written by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.... posted on Aug 21, 7121 reads

The Unplanned Organization
A traditional concept in organizational leadership is that people resist change, so the standard antidote is for strong leadership to manipulate change. Yet in this article, Margaret Wheatley upends this idea of control and shows that humans are similar to natural ecosystems with an inherent impulse to grow. Life always wants to emerge, create and evolve both on the individual level and within lar... posted on Jun 15, 9428 reads

Fritjof Capra on Life and Leadership
"Sustainability is not an individual property, but is a property of an entire web of relationships. It is a community practice. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. Because of the close connection between sustainability and community, basic principles of ecology can also be understood as principles of community. In par... posted on Feb 28, 10534 reads

Losing His Voice Led Him to Helping Others Strengthen Theirs
"There are lots of ways to lose your voice in this world." These words were spoken by Kevin Hancock, an award-winning author, public speaker, and CEO of Hancock Lumber, one of Americas oldest and most prestigious family businesses. In 2010, Kevin developed a voice disorder called spasmodic dysphonia. As his speaking voice became quiet, the voice of his soul became louder. This new voice urged... posted on Nov 6, 5866 reads

In Good We Trust
San Francisco has nearly one nonprofit organization for every 100 residents, and the Bay Area spends more than twice as much per capita in the nonprofit sector as the nation does as a whole. SF Bay Area innovators have been drivers of the environmental, antiwar, civil rights, and AIDS movements and now the nonprofit sector. "They wanted to change the world, and now a lot of them are, by running k... posted on Aug 11, 3845 reads

India's Tree Planting Guru
An Indian civil servant, SM Raju, has come up with a novel way of providing employment to millions of poor in the eastern state of Bihar. His campaign to encourage people to plant trees effectively addresses two burning issues of the world: global warming and shrinking job opportunities. Evidence of Mr Raju's success could clearly be seen on 30 August, when he organised 300,000 villagers from over... posted on Sep 19, 4193 reads

A Quiet Savior
Though her story is nearly forgotten, she was once America's most admired civil servant. Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey's journey - honored with the FDA's first Kelsey Award - has transformed medical safety in the US and throughout the industrialized world. Thanks to Dr. Kelsey, thalidomide - causing children to be born limbless or with flipper-like arms and legs - had a far more limited effect in th... posted on Nov 16, 2916 reads

Teens Become Civil Servant Guitar Stars
After overhearing her children talk of starting a rock band and noticing that nothing ever came of their dreams, Sandra Rizkallah and her husband, Tom Pugh, decided to help. Starting with five teens, the group soon evolved into a full-fledged nonprofit that has affected 400 students. But it's become more than just music. Throughout the year, the teens put on benefit concerts, donating the proceeds... posted on Nov 5, 2092 reads

The Winter Pilgrim
In October 2007, Ann Sieben, a native of Denver, Colorado and a nuclear engineer by profession, was waiting for a work permit in Spain that never came through. Instead of looking for other work, she decided to walk on foot along an ancient pilgrimage path known as the Camino de Santiago. Later, in December of that year, she walked over 2100 kilometers from Canterbury to Rome. The following winter,... posted on Oct 26, 17839 reads

Health 3.0: Where Medicine Needs to Go
Health 1.0 is run as a cottage industry without evidence-based guidelines, quality measures, or standardization. Volume trumps value. This model bankrupted and shortchanged the quality of healthcare. It is over. Health 2.0 is evidence-based medicine. It is online. Electronic health records are central to its cause. The patient becomes an e-patient who Silicon Valley diagnoses using data-mining and... posted on Aug 25, 9527 reads

To Light Up the Sky Together
The Indian spiritual leader Vinoba Bhave began the Bhoodan (Land-Gift) Movement, walking for 20 years through the length and breadth of India persuading land owners and landlords to give land to their poor, totaling four million acres of land. He tells us: "Our real strength lies in the fact that we are servants. The divinity in each and every person can be witnessed and reached, only when you app... posted on May 2, 5671 reads

7 Principles of Meaningful Relationships for Servant Leaders
"A company is a collection of people working toward a shared goal that they couldn't otherwise do on their own. In essence, the foundation of work is relationships.
However, often when we are stuck, especially in work, it is because we interact with others transactionally instead of engaging with them, human to human. And when we are unhappy at work, we might blame it on someone else but th... posted on Jun 9, 5526 reads

The New Old Age
Still wondering what you want to be when you grow up? Turns out, you're not alone. A fascinating phenomenon is burgeoning among retiring adults as they step out of their primary careers and into "the Encore Years". Programs at institutions like Stanford and Harvard have cropped up to support such transitions, particularly for established leaders. Such a process unearths raw questions on the nature... posted on Feb 15, 3794 reads

Untitled
At the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, 82-year-old Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy has solved the mystery of leadership: He brings eyesight to the blind and light to the soul. Today, he runs five hospitals that perform more than 180,000 operations each year. Seventy percent of his patients are charity cases; the remaining 30% seek him out and pay for his services because the quality of his wor... posted on Apr 10, 2078 reads

Mandela's 8 Lessons of Leadership
"Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg -- a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know -- his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly... posted on Oct 21, 8127 reads

The Language of Service
While volunteering at a school for the deaf in Kenya, Kevin Long asked a young girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She looked at him with a puzzled expression and responded, "But, I'm deaf." Those words changed Kevin's life, and upon returning to Minnesota in 1997 he started Global Deaf Connection with the vision of providing education and leadership skills to deaf students in developing... posted on Feb 17, 830 reads

Be-ing Other-centered in Business
He teaches them to be grateful and wants them to meditate. But Prof. Srikumar Rao's isn't a spiritual teacher: he teaches at Columbia Business School! In his gentle voice, he asks them to stop living in a "me centered" world and start living in an "other centered" one. In one exercise, students spend an hour each day for a week helping someone else without expecting anything in return. It may not ... posted on May 24, 2175 reads

Legendary Doctor Passes On
Dr. V(enkataswamy), the legendary eye surgeon from South India, who with his own two hands restored the sight of over 100,000 people, passed away late last week. His work resulted in one of the world's most extraordinary models of service delivery. Thirty years ago, at the age of 58, he started an 11-bed eye clinic in an old temple-city, and with his team, turned Aravind Eye Care System into the l... posted on Jul 10, 2058 reads

Clinton's Global Initiative
The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was created by Bill Clinton to develop a new model for philanthropy in the 21st century. For three days last September, CGI brought together some of the world's best minds and problem solvers. The organization functions like a marketplace for global change, where those with the passion to make a difference -- and others with the means to finance them -- come tog... posted on Nov 17, 3244 reads

Wired For Leadership?
When participants in a trial at Arizona State University were asked to think about the future, levels of brain activity varied significantly between those considered visionaries and non-visionaries. Visionaries showed much higher levels of brain activity than non-visionaries in areas of the brain associated with visual processing and organization of information. The visionary leaders had more effi... posted on Oct 1, 2262 reads

From Good to Great
Jim Collins, perhaps the most influential management expert alive today, has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at more than a hundred corporations and non-profits worldwide. Collins' 2001 book, "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't," attained long-running positions. In 2005, Collins, a former Stanford University business school professor, wrote a 3... posted on Dec 30, 4038 reads

What Business Execs Should Know About Non-Profits
Business leaders play vital roles in the nonprofit sector – as board members, donors, partners, and even executives. Yet all too often they underestimate the unique challenges of managing nonprofit organizations. In this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, 11 executives who have played leadership roles in both for-profits and nonprofits reveal the critical differences between the... posted on Jul 15, 3553 reads

What Leaders Should Know About Followers
There is no leader without at least one follower -- that's obvious. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders' development rather than followers' or mistakenly as... posted on Aug 4, 3542 reads

Rebuilding Generations Through Football
What began as one man's passion to help at risk kids has become the vision of many through the Playmakers Mentoring Foundation and their innovative program which began in California. Developed and led by Coach Greg Roeszler (Aka Coach Roz) and his dedicated staff of assistant coaches, Playmakers is drawing kids off the streets and out of gangs to be part of this amazing outreach where children are... posted on Nov 15, 2867 reads

Extraordinary Minds
Mozart, Freud, Virginia Woolf and Gandhi. Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard, in one of his books, "Extraordinary Minds," examines these four people of tremendous ability. Using these four extraordinary, but very different, people, he attempts to answer a question once posed by Plato and still asked today: Is there a set of traits that is shared among all great achievers no matter how different ... posted on May 10, 3454 reads

Leadership Lessons from Delta's CEO
In the fast pace of today's organizations -- whether corporate, nonprofit, or government -- not many leaders cite patience as the most important lesson they have learned. Even fewer leaders likely hand-write a half-dozen thank-you notes every day. The NY Times shares highlights from an interview with Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines, whose advice on careers is to "just focus on getting you... posted on Jul 10, 4223 reads

Hardest Working Mayor of North America
Hazel McCallion is a wonderful example of leadership for many reasons: she has been the mayor of Mississauga, Ontario for 30+ years, re-elected 10 times, and is responsible for a debt-free district while creating a vibrant downtown. She's done all this with great energy and enthusiasm while approaching 90 years old! Watch her interact with others and you'll find her smile to be contagious!... posted on Jul 30, 5787 reads

The Biology of Leadership
"The salient discovery is that certain things leaders do -- specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others' moods -- literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more) independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to each other. Rather, the individual mind... posted on Nov 10, 6044 reads

Managing with the Brain in Mind
People who feel betrayed or unrecognized at work -- for example, when they are reprimanded, given an assignment that seems unworthy, or told to take a pay cut -- experience it as a neural impulse, as powerful and painful as a physical blow. Most people learn to rationalize or temper their reactions, but they also limit their commitment and engagement. They become purely transactional employees, re... posted on Oct 12, 6560 reads

A School That Serves As A Lifeline
Principal Sherrie Gahn said she was shocked when she first came to Whitney Elementary School seven years ago."The kids were eating ketchup packets," Gahn said. "I said to one of my teachers, 'What on Earth are they doing?' and she said, 'That's their dinner.' " Whitney Elementary is in a dusty, rundown neighborhood of Las Vegas. Families here live at the edge of financial disaster. Gahn estimates ... posted on Dec 10, 3535 reads

Ask How Are You and Mean It
When asked about her greatest life lessons, artistic director Judith Jameson responds, "It starts with 'Hello, how are you.' And listening." In this humble interview, she shares gems of wisdom, ranging from humble leadership -- "Let people do things. If they do it better than you, let them do it" -- to staying grounded -- "Keep it human. Keep it alive. Don't turn into a robot... You have to liste... posted on Oct 17, 1564 reads

Oprah: A Case Study Comes Alive
Intuitively, there's something very powerful about Oprah Winfrey. At least that's what Professor Nancy Koehn of Harvard Business School thought. Of the entrepreneur who juggles her own talk show, magazine, and book club, one might ask, What exactly is Oprah in the business of? Why is she such a compelling leader? According to Koehn, it boils down to two elements: Purpose and Service. "It is a stor... posted on Jul 29, 8865 reads

Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy
Watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and glean some lessons: A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. The first follower is critical in showing everyone else how to follow. The second follower validates. A movement must be public. After the nth follower tipping point, it becomes risky not to follow, and more join in. And the commentators take-away from a... posted on Oct 7, 9306 reads

Building Curious Employees
Design thinking is a process of empathizing with the end user. David Kelley, founder of IDEO and Stanford's d.school design program, takes a similar approach to managing people. He believes leadership is a matter of empathizing with employees. In this interview, he explains why leaders should seek understanding rather than blind obedience, why it's better to be a coach and a taskmaster and the eff... posted on May 31, 4700 reads

Using Soccer to Turn it Around
Lisa Wrightsman used soccer to turn her life around, and now she's using it to help others do the same. Wrightsman was in a semipro league, but later succumbed to drugs, alcohol, homelessness and jail. Last year, however, she entered a Volunteers of America recovery program and discovered their street soccer program. With soccer as her pivot, she made a big shift in her own life, and then saw the ... posted on Jul 29, 3974 reads

The Inner Landscape of Beauty
For the late Celtic mystic John O'Donohue, the visible world isn't all there is -- it's "the first shoreline of the invisible world." The question of what should I do, is secondary to the question of "how should I be?" In short, spirituality isn't an esoteric notion, but an accessible, natural response to the landscapes of beauty around us, and within us. His unique perspective, captured in this r... posted on Aug 25, 6538 reads

Remembering Steve Jobs' Insights
Steve Jobs, the iconic founder of Apple, died yesterday, and though the world will remember him for his legendary leadership, his creative genius, or his passion for design, he was also a man of inspiring insights. In this powerful 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Jobs shares three personal stories, urging his audience to always "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish." ... posted on Oct 6, 11975 reads

The Leadership Genius of Bob the Builder
Most of us believe in positive self-talk. "I can achieve anything," we mouth to the mirror in the morning. We believe we'll do better if we banish doubts about our ability or our strategy and instead muster an inner voice that affirms our awesomeness. But not Bob the Builder. You might not realise it, but the overall-clad, stop-motion animated construction executive -- who debuted on CBBC in 1999 ... posted on Jan 7, 7194 reads

How to Attend A Conference As Yourself
"I often feel awkward when I go to a conference. Reluctant to sidle up to a stranger and introduce myself, I roam, like I did at college parties, self-conscious, seltzer water in hand, not fitting in. In the midst of a sea of people chatting away enthusiastically, I am uncomfortable and alone. But when my plane from New York landed in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest, the music, film, and inte... posted on Apr 9, 0 reads

Why Leaders Must Feel Pain
On a plane flying cross-country, a CEO and management consultant tunes into a fellow passenger's sharp-edged interaction with her five-year old daughter, and finds himself unexpectedly in tears. The incident unleashes a series of insights on the importance of acknowledging the pain we encounter in ourselves and the world. "This act of diving deeply into the feelings we avoid, the feelings we don't... posted on May 7, 20892 reads

The 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses
A few years ago, Geoffrey James interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in an attempt to uncover the secret of their leadership abilities. He learned that the world's most accomplished managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. According to James, the "best of the best" tend to share the following eight core beliefs.... posted on Apr 27, 27249 reads

Who Are You Really Mad At?
A father yells at his son who then hits his sister. A boss gets upset at a manager who then yells at their employees. In both obvious and subtle forms, people often do or say something to someone when it's really intended for someone else. In this honest self-reflection, leadership expert Peter Bregman looks more deeply at his own behaviour to discover freedom from habits and the choice of more th... posted on Aug 7, 23562 reads

How To Respond to Failure
"Typically, when people fail, we blame them. Or teach them. Or try to make them feel better. But the learning -- the avoidance of future failures -- only comes once they feel okay about themselves after failing. And that feeling comes from empathy." In this article, a business advisor describes an interaction between a nine-year-old and her grandmother -- and the unexpected lesson in leadership an... posted on Sep 4, 57855 reads

11 Must-Read Books for Young Leaders
"Recently, I wrote that leaders should be readers. Reading has a host of benefits for those who wish to occupy positions of leadership and develop into more relaxed, empathetic, and well-rounded people. One of the most common follow-up questions was, "Ok, so what should I read?" That's a tough question. There are a number of wonderful reading lists out there... But if I had to focus on a short lis... posted on Dec 19, 33097 reads

Seva Cafe: Serving Generosity on a Platter
Siddharth Sthalekar quit a lucrative job to explore alternatives to the premise of accumulation. He and his wife Lahar journeyed across India and soon woke up to the beauty of the gift economy -- a system where goods and services are extended unconditionally and without any formal quid pro quo. Their experiences moved the couple to join "Seva Cafe" -- a restaurant powered by generosity rather than... posted on Apr 29, 31194 reads

Avoiding the 'I'll-Give-Back-Later' Trap
Steve Davis is president and CEO of PATH, an international nonprofit whose goal is to help communities break longstanding cycles of poor health. The cross-sectoral skills he attained during his earlier work in other organizations, he says, are crucial when it comes to adapting innovations to the places that need them most. In this interview, he talks about his approach to leadership and the import... posted on Oct 26, 14030 reads

The Truth Demands To Be Lived
Among many other assignments, Americ Azevedo, philosopher, author and lecturer of peace studies, now leads a meditation class with 603 students in one of the largest lecture halls on the UC Berkeley campus. He has taught university classes in philosophy, religion, leadership, finance, business and information systems,and held the first podcast at UC Berkeley in 2005. He now co-teaches a class on i... posted on Nov 12, 29367 reads

A 29-Year-Old's Undying Legacy of Love
He wasn't famous in the usual sense. But no one who met him ever forgot him. Raghu Makwana lost his legs to polio as a child. But he did not let that stop him from serving the world. When a group of students found him he was a young runaway arranging people's footwear outside a local temple. Struck by his luminous spirit they arranged to have him join a non-profit at the Gandhi Ashram in India. In... posted on Feb 10, 35476 reads

The 5 Conditions for the Emergence of Collective Wisdom
There is immense transformative power in the collective if we can learn to skillfully harness the energy that emerges when we gather. In this piece, author and leadership consultant Alan Briskin outlines five conditions for the emergence of collective wisdom. Read on to see which elements you can leverage in your life.... posted on Apr 29, 23771 reads