Leadership is Global
Co-Creating a More Humane and Sustainable World

Global Leadership Network co-chairs and Leadership is Global co-editors Walter Link (Europe), Thais Corral (Brazil) and Mark Gerzon (USA) are pleased to announce the publication of the first independent, globally written and designed book on “global leadership” featuring the writings of 22 co-authors from around the world.

About the book:
A generation ago, more than a dozen women from around the world wrote a book called Sisterhood Is Global, which helped to catalyze and define the global women’s movement. We chose our title out of respect for this and other movements, which crucially advance a new paradigm of civilization and leadership so sorely needed in today’s world in which human conflict and insustainability threaten our very survival.

Instead of realizing that “global” solutions require awakening to new and integral leadership perspectives and practices, we too often assume that we can apply to the whole world the same old bag of tricks we inherited from our families and cultures, professions and political ideologies – but that is what brought us to the brink. Instead, we need to hear and learn from each other. In dialogue, we need to find solutions that arise from the richness of our diversity as well as from the depth of our shared humanity to support our joint sustainability.

These global solutions must unite us across the potential divides not only of nationality and culture, religion and political beliefs, but also of societal sectors and social classes, professions and types of organizations, divisions of heart and mind, body and soul, which are as divisive and often more unconscious than the national borders we are used to acknowledging.

No single author can possibly hope to capture and bridge the awesome complexity of today’s global leadership challenges and opportunities. We need each other to collectively understand and bring to life this new paradigm of civilization and leadership.

We therefore invite you to join this crucial dialogue about global developments and inspiring yet pragmatic leadership approaches, which this book hosts for 22 co-authors from around the world - each writing from the diversity of their individual and cultural dignity, while also representing the unity of our shared humanity.

What the book’s 21 chapters have in common is the focus on leadership in an interdependent world and the ways we can effectively work together and overcome our conflicts. They all ask fundamental questions, which today every leader, irrespective of profession or nationality, needs to address.

Launch at ILA:
We are delighted to have launched Leadership is Global at the November 2006 annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, one of the world’s premier global organizations devoted to fostering inclusive, cross-cultural leadership education and practice.

Thanks to the invitation of the ILA, the three co-editors, and our Nairobi-based co-author and GLN colleague Kimani Njogu, are offering this year’s opening keynote as well as a series of workshops to the Association’s distinguished community of leadership educators and practitioners from throughout the world.

Leadership is Global appears in the year that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the US office of the Japanese Shinnyo-En Foundation, which helped to publish this first edition. We want to thank the foundation and also the production team, in particular Katia Miller and copy editor Ben Levi for their generous co-creation of this beautiful and historic book. We also thank our many other contributors, in particular the Mediators Foundation, Redeh (The Network for Human Development) and The Global Academy, which provided this extensive project with crucial resources.