The Leadership Labyrinth: Values For a Livable Future

The Leadership Labyrinth is designed for the next generation of leaders emerging in the disruptive digital age of social media, global interconnections, social influencers, and fake news. Leadership researchers have long emphasized “soft power” qualities of effective leadership that are especially essential in turbulent times but perhaps not in the toolkit of tech savvy digital natives.  Eager to fast-track their business, computer science, and engineering degrees and robust social networks into high-impact careers, the bright, energetic, hardworking emerging next generation leaders can quickly confront dilemmas beyond their level of ethical expertise.  Good intentions, technical skills, and algorithms are useful but insufficient for the inescapable complexity, risk, struggle, and courage required of leaders grappling with contested values and moral urgency in conditions of uncertainty, risk, and threat. 

The Leadership Labyrinth is anchored in a basic premise that people are committed to maintaining personal integrity as a solid moral foundation for their careers and eager to grow as conscientious leaders in a world of diverse people, organizations, and communities. The book packs depth and breadth of diverse scholarship and expertise in a conversational workbook aimed less at mastering content than about using content for self-mastery and soft power skills for navigating difficult moral terrain. Organized in a series of thematic conversations, it invites readers to explore the complex architecture of human values in various dimensions: personal, organizational, societal, cultural, and cross-cultural. In the process, they cultivate skills and dispositions of self-awareness, constructive thinking, collaborative inquiry, dialogue, discernment, and decision-making that will foster their effectiveness as conscientious leaders.

The Leadership Labyrinth has a distinct point of view: Leadership is about being and activating your best self by fulfilling a deeper purpose that connects you to fostering the best in a world beyond yourself. There are many ways of fulfilling that deeper purpose and one of the most creative challenges of leadership is discovering how to fulfill that purpose in a way that expands human capabilities and fulfills the highest human potential in oneself and others.