Why did I begin?
How I decided to write a book
I taught my first course on leadership in organizations in the late 1990s, when the internet was still shiny and new, when people were still debating whether email should be considered “official company communication,” and were wondering whether all computers would somehow implode when dates rolled over to 1/1/00 in an event ominously named “Y2K.”
We were already exploring questions of power and control, and the mis-fit of industrial-age management styles to the rising “knowledge economy” back then. Some of us were starting to write about the importance of inclusion and the power of different voices to foster innovation and drive breakthroughs, but our work was not “mainstream.”
I often found myself turning to sociology, and women’s studies, and political science, and ethnic studies, and looking at interdisciplinary work to make sense of things that went largely unaddressed in the leadership literature:
- what conditions foster voice and what inhibits it?
- what empowers people to operate autonomously?
- what makes change easier or harder?
- what favors collaboration over siloed thinking?
What I found was sparse and disconnected. When I walked into my classroom to teach on 9/12/01, my students…
