Integral Leadership ReviewNotes on
Insights on Leadership,Volume One: Research and Theory
Barbara Mossberg
Whether ancient Sphinx or emergent science, wisdom says it's all about connecting. Insights on Leadership boldly takes up what is historically humanity's hardest and most essential and creative work. The purpose of this ambitious series is to provide the emergent leadership field a way of understanding how and why to connect various theories and visions. The goal is a larger unified field theory exploring leadership through integral practice, theory and development.
Leadership has been on our minds from the Big Bang of human consciousness, and naturally so. Humanity has great stakes in who becomes leaders and how they think and act. Although much is written about leadership, and there are scores of leadership development and studies programs worldwide, insights and knowledge are scattered across cultures, disciplines, and social sectors. Russ Volckmann is out to change all this. Insights on Leadership provides a record of an on-going forum on leadership that draws together some of the most influential people in the field, and in the process of engagement, creates a new synthesis and consciousness of connection.
Using language from emergent science's chaos theory, I would describe Dr. Volckmann as what could be called a strange attractor. He is a proactive magnet. He seeks and gathers in the expressive energies of people and ideas all over the world on the topic of leadership. Drawn together, the leaders Dr. Volckmann combines are propelled into something called "integral leadership," an approach to generate increased integration of the diverse work on leadership. The resulting dynamics of these colliding connections are seen in this volume.
The book is especially useful for leadership courses, seminars and leadership book groups. Students will find outstanding primary source material on leadership theory in which masters are challenged to reflect on ideas after their significant works have been published and read.
Insights on Leadership is unique in its interview structure. What makes for compelling reading is the dynamical exchanges between the apparently insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm of the interviewing editor and entrepreneur of integral theory, and his subjects, who, despite or perhaps because of, guru status and eminence in the field, open themselves to further explorations of thinking.
This work is meant to kindle conversations and to take the field of leadership studies to new integral places. In the process, the reader sees a learning community being born before one's eyes. A dynamical leadership development world is being born around integral theory, in which arts and sciences, philosophy and practice combine in new trajectories. Readers and leaders of any type will find useful ways to think about leadership. Leaders will feel respected, reflected, and at home in these pages. Through a collaborative process generated by the probing interviews these leaders become not static entities in their individual contributions to the leadership field, completed and confined to old textbooks, but dynamic and newly relevant with fresh insights. Thus the gift of this series, Insights on Leadership: is not only for the next generations of leaders and leadership developers, but for the continuously evolving leadership of current thinkers and practitioners.
Barbara Mossberg, PhD, is President Emerita of Goddard College, Senior Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, Professor and Director of the Integrated Studies Program, California State University, Monterey Bay.
