whom have shown me unwavering acceptance throughout my life—and to all those who have taught me important lessons about inclusion, from the deserts of El Paso to Black Rock City and from the halls of UC Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies department to the tiny office of Vegan Action.
CONTENTS
PART 1: THE OPERATING ENVIRONMENT
Chapter 2 THE POWER OF NARRATIVE
PART 2: HARNESSING THE POWER OF INCLUSION
Chapter 3 THE ECONOMICS OF INCLUSION: PARTICIPATION, PERSONALIZATION, AND PURPOSE
Chapter 5 THE POWER OF BELONGING
Chapter 6 BELONGING ISN’T OPTIONAL
Chapter 7 CONNECT EFFORT WITH MEANING
Chapter 8 THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE NOT THINKING ABOUT
Chapter 9 PREVENT DECISION PARALYSIS
Chapter 10 COLLABORATE AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE ORGANIZATION
Chapter 12 THE LEADERSHIP INSTINCTS: LISTEN, AMPLIFY, INCLUDE
Chapter 13 TRUST EARNED EARLY AND OFTEN
PREFACE
Often the best things result from the most unexpected collaborations. Based on this belief—a belief at the very core of this book—we set out to examine today’s leadership environment and to share some insights about how to navigate it. We concluded that a forty-one-year-old UC Berkeley professor and a forty-one-year-veteran U.S. Army general have very little in common except a deep and unwavering belief that most of the hard problems we face in our businesses, in our local communities, at the national level, and internationally can be solved with better leadership. Along the way, we learned that listening to each other was the first and most important step in our journey and that including diverse perspectives always produced surprising and valuable leadership insights. Ultimately we arrived at a message and how we would deliver it, a task that felt both more difficult and more important with the passage of time.
We feel a genuine urgency about our message. Few would dispute our assertion that the world began to change dramatically in 2001, but we have found the character and pace of change since 2001 more remarkable than we expected: challenges to the predictable and familiar “order of things” in business, government, international relations, and even our sense of national identity; increasing religious extremism; the emergence of global peer competitors; the proliferation of technology, and—since about 2010—ubiquitous access to data and information for virtually everybody, all the time, everywhere. Status quo companies, militaries, countries—those that for a very long time enjoyed unchallenged power—are now palpably fearful that their power is eroding. Their instinct is to exert control. It’s the wrong instinct.
• • •
Although the world has changed, the way we think about leadership hasn’t kept pace. Often the result is suboptimal objectives decided upon too late, measured with the wrong metrics, and implemented with overconfidence by a workforce that is not sufficiently empowered to deliver them.
This book challenges us to refresh our thinking about leadership. It’s not that the things we’ve always done as leaders won’t work anymore. In fact, we will suggest that some of them should be reinforced. But we’ll also suggest that there are several emerging leadership principles and instincts that are gaining in importance and that demand careful thought and serious consideration—that is, if we want our leadership to match the times and meet their challenges.
To be sure, this book was written during a period of considerable political disagreement about our country’s future, especially about how much selectivity to exert about who belongs within and who is excluded outside our borders and our communities. But this book is not a commentary on political leadership. While we’d like to think that it has something to offer to those who have been elected to lead the country through the most pressing issues of our time, we believe that it will most strongly resonate among organizational leaders, especially those facing industry, market, and cultural transformations. This book is an exploration of what happens when there’s a mutation in the very core DNA of an organization.
Whether it’s being a member of a family, attending a school, or serving our country, belonging to a community or a cause bigger than ourselves is core to our very humanity in three specific ways: belonging shapes our identity, it provides our sense of security, and it creates the order we need to survive.
We develop our identity based on the communities we join (“I’m a dad,”
“I’m an American,”
“I’m a soldier”). Being part of a community, in turn, provides us with security—when a parent sacrifices everything for their kids, when a teammate stays late to help a coworker finish a project, and in a thousand other ways, being a part of a community means that there are others who are committed to our success. Finally, in being a part of a community, we can expect our fellow members to abide by a certain set of rules, making our day-to-day existence predictable and thus productive.
Part of the very contract of belonging, though, is exclusion. We cluster ourselves in neighborhoods, hold tryouts for sports teams, and require exams for certain schools, thereby creating a sense of belonging among those who make the cut. Soldiers will often do anything—even
