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, 20896 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, 27250 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, 23565 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, 57856 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, 33103 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, 31196 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, 14033 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, 29368 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, 35478 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

Rudy Corpuz: It Takes a Hood to Save the Hood
Rudy Corpuz, an anti-violence activist was born and raised in San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s in a neighborhood where drugs and gangs were the norm. He had a rough start, never graduated from high school, didn't start reading until he was in the eighth grade, dealt and did drugs, and was a gang leader. He then had a magical turning point, a "a dramatic change of heart" that catapulted him into ... posted on Oct 20, 7801 reads

Leadership Lessons From Specially Abled Children
"I was of course at that time focusing on autism specifically. I kind of had a personal understanding of the situation. That led to a very interesting conversation with a very dear friend from Denmark, Thorkil Sonne, who also had a son with autism and who started a software company where all his employees were people on the spectrum. I met him, I tried to understand the model that he is working on... posted on Oct 10, 8921 reads

Inspiring Women Speaking Up for Women
In 2014, at the tender age of 17, Malala Yousafzai was named co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in fighting for the rights of all children to an education. Malala's story is just one of 23 that were chosen by Salt -- a magazine devoted to celebrating those who offer authentic leadership -- as women who are making a transformative impact of the lives of other women around th... posted on Mar 4, 17623 reads

Everyday Conversations to Heal Racism
"I am a second-generation Mexican American leadership coach and elder living in California. I experienced so much prejudice and racism during my young adulthood that for years I avoided even being in the presence of white people. Finally, well into my 30s, I realized that the wounds and pain I carried were robbing me of my full potential. I could do better than be angry at other people; I could wo... posted on Apr 8, 10930 reads

How Great Leaders Inspire Action
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers . He shares more here, in one of the most popular TED talks of all time.... posted on Jun 20, 23176 reads

What Science Taught Me About Gratitude, Compassion & Awe
Dacher Keltner, world renowned psychologist and researcher credited with expanding the field of science to include emotions, offers thought leadership that can shift our cultural narrative towards kindness and care. He shows us that the levels of the basic human nervous system include compassion (through experiments in which images of human suffering lit up the subjects' mammalian nervous system),... posted on Nov 4, 30841 reads

Leadership & Authentic Self Esteem
"There was a time when we believed self-esteem to be the royal road to flourishing...However, later studies showed that increases in self-esteem did little for our happiness or performance, but ample for our egos. Professor Roy Baumeister's work with self-esteem showed that we'd been raising a generation of narcissists who went on to wreck havoc in their lives and in their workplaces. It now appea... posted on Oct 18, 16614 reads

12 Questions Around Volunteerism
In this thoughtful piece ServiceSpace founder Nipun Mehta fields twelve probing questions on how to nurture and sustain a volunteer culture."Since 1999, ServiceSpace has been volunteer-run. It's a constraint and an asset. It opens us up to sensing multiple forms of capital...Leadership turns into laddership. Compassion is contagious; instead of pushing, we count on the pull. The metaphor shifts fr... posted on Jan 12, 19407 reads

Bloombars: A Conversation with John Chambers
"I think I was the only person of color in my entire school who wasn't placed in Special Ed. There was definitely an expectation of failure. So I left my senior year to attend Solebury School in New Hope, PA. This one-year experience really changed the way I thought, and it also forced me into leadership positions. I kind of reinvented, or discovered, myself -- probably both, to be honest. How fas... posted on Feb 2, 3764 reads

Community-Led Initiatives that Are Protecting the Natural World
In 2008, Ecuador's leadership rewrote its constitution to include the rights of nature, effectively awarding legal rights to the environment. Indigenous communities have recognized the rights of nature for thousands of years, but Ecuador was the first country to make it a constitutional right by awarding ecosystems legal rights to protect the environment and its people. It was a seminal moment for... posted on Jan 20, 12646 reads

21 Lessons on Leadership and Love from an Uncommon Master
Frederic Pignon and his wife, Magali Delgado, travel the world performing and leading horsemanship and dressage clinics. Magali dazzles audiences with her ability to perform high-level dressage moves without so much as a bridle. Together the duo invite humanity into an altogether different approach to relationship. Their philosophy towards horses is actually a way of life: love, respect and unders... posted on Feb 13, 1546 reads

The Politics of the Brokenhearted
In this interview, Michael Lerner talks with Dr. Parker Palmer about education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. Palmer describes the tension needed today for grappling with the problems around us. He describes it as standing in the tragic gap the necessity of holding the space between that which is and that which we see as what could or should be. We are not to fall into eit... posted on Sep 3, 5896 reads

Taking an Empowered and Creative View Towards Technology
Social change pioneer Tiffany Shlain is changing the conversation around how we relate to technology. Instead of thinking of our devices as separate from us, we should think of them as an extension of who we are, she argues. "We're now living in a culture that's so 24/7, and there's no moments of reflection. We don't have that embedded into our lives anymore." A filmmaker, activist, and public spe... posted on Aug 11, 6069 reads

The Gift of Presence and the Perils of Advice
Parker Palmer is the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. His work teaches us to connect with others through our authentic self. His courses help to develop courageous leadership and collectively evolve our spirits for social change. With humor and heart, Parker shares his perspectives on advice giving vs the gift of our presence. Leading us into presence with uncondit... posted on Jan 1, 15072 reads

We Contain Multitudes
"It's possible to be a person with all of a multitude of experiences all at the same time. You can be a kid barely removed from a trailer park with an illiterate grandfather and disruptive mental illness in your family and go to Duke and study Shakespeare and build a successful career and eventually go to New York City and take a company public as a CEO. I actually think we would be better served ... posted on Mar 9, 9201 reads

Gathering as a Form of Leadership
Priya Parker is an author, strategist, and the founder of Thrive Labs, a company devoted to helping organizations create intentional and transformative gatherings. She is also the author of, 'The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.' In this interview she speaks to how we can forge stronger connections and more meaningful experiences through gatherings -- whether it's a birthday party... posted on Sep 19, 7175 reads

Soft Power: A Magnetic Approach to Practice
"The desire to be in control is a normal survival response, but what I love about the art of aikido is that we can move beyond survival to a vast and universal perspective in which all life is connected and interwoven. Such an orientation is not self-conscious. Since it relates to the connecting aspect -- that of the space and energy -- rather than individuals, there is no thing that needs to be o... posted on Jul 18, 9307 reads

Leading Above the Line
"In this Farnam Street interview, Jim Dethmer, founder of The Conscious Leadership Group shares practical advice about becoming more self-aware, ditching the victim mindset, and connecting more fully with the people in our lives. This episode is a masterclass in understanding and regulating your thoughts and emotions. Dethmer covers how to operate from a place of love rather than fear and anger, t... posted on Dec 30, 4481 reads

Even If You've Not Been Fed, Be Bread.
"In my role as director of the nonprofit Mercy Beyond Borders, I am frequently in South Sudan visiting our education projects for girls and our micro-enterprise projects with women and our leadership training of young women for advocacy. Keeping girls in school protects them from early marriages, allows them to develop their gifts, sets them on the path to pursue professional careers. The small lo... posted on Apr 4, 7511 reads

Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "Where Do We Go from Here?" sermon at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The country was at a crossroads. The "evil triplets" of the times, militarism, racism, and poverty called for what King called a "radical revolution of values." Will we move in the direction of chaos or community? The qu... posted on Sep 16, 3317 reads

The Leadership Imperative
"Oren Lyons, seventy-six, is a wisdom carrier, one of the bearers of a variety of human tradition that cant easily be reduced to a couple of sentences. One reason he and the tradition for which he is a spokesperson isn't more widely known is that he doesn't actively seek forums from which to speak. If someone asks him, however, about the principles behind the particular Native American tradition... posted on Aug 8, 4602 reads

A Portal to Presence
"A 'Portal to Presence' is exactly what it says: a simple doorway or entrance to the field of Consciousness or Presence. It would be stretching the meaning of the word "technique" or "method" to apply it to this idea. One just walks through the portal as one becomes aware of its existence. There is no effort involved such as a decision to remain in the doorway, or to walk through on one's hands an... posted on Nov 9, 4584 reads

Creativity & Leadership in Learning Communities
"Every living system occasionally encounters points of instability, at which some of its structures break down and new structures, or new forms of behavior, emerge. The spontaneous emergence of order -- of new structures and new forms of behavior--is one of the hallmarks of life. This phenomenon, often simply called emergence, has been recognized as the basis of development, learning, and evolutio... posted on Jan 25, 1198 reads

IntraConnected: Discovering MWe (Me + We)
"We may have a mental understanding that all of life is one inseparable whole, yet how do we actually feel into this reality? And how do we relate to others and the world from this felt awareness? Dr. Daniel J. Siegel is a visionary creative thinker, professor, and founder of the field of interpersonal neurobiology. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Siegel about his book IntraConnected: ... posted on Mar 10, 2396 reads

David Whyte: On Seeking Language Large Enough
"It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality -- indeed, this drama of vitality -- is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theolo... posted on Jun 18, 4230 reads

Excavating Ancestral Wisdom
"Stephen Lewis, a social catalyst of community transformation and healing, was shaped by the classroom and medicine making activities that existed within his grandparents' kitchen. Without a college education, Stephen's grandparents held degrees in the practice of hospitality, leadership formation, and business. They were wise elders, farmers, food alchemists, educators, and community healers who ... posted on Jul 7, 1221 reads

The Medicine of Memory
"Every life is like a day. We begin the night before and, in the darkness, we are formed as a word that strikes a spark. This spark lands like a seed coming to the ground in the soul of the womb. Then miraculous growth pulses like wildfirean unstoppable explosion of unimaginable geniusthe exponential roar of universal proportion. Every life well-lived holds in its hearts core the knowing that all ... posted on Jul 18, 4860 reads

Be-The-Change Corporations
Jay Coen Gilbert explores leadership questions of the heart during his address at Gandhi 3.0 in January 2024, sharing his own story about the friction he experienced when he found himself “tethered and constrained” to “somebody else’s dharma” and how that led to exploration with like-minded leaders. Gilbert confronts the systemic beliefs prevalent today including a &l... posted on Apr 16, 1853 reads

ChatGPT: A Partner in Unknowing
Writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout takes us through a insightful exploration in her essay on how ChatGPT is mere a reflection of our own limited ways of viewing the world. In her work with students and in building capacity with individuals and communities to hold conflict and navigate complexity across various levels of authority, she looks into how ChatGPT gets us, humans, to what... posted on May 15, 2995 reads