Reading List

These are books by friends, colleagues and other leading authors that have informed and contributed to Center for Social Transformation and Leadership Thought Leadership:

• Appreciative Inquiry, by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
  Written by the founders of AI, this short, practical guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more positive future.
• The Art of Convening, by Craig & Patricia Neal, with Cindy Wold
  Details a powerful set of principles and practices for making any gathering productive, meaningful, and transformative.
• The Art of Possibility, by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
  Presenting twelve breakthrough practices for bringing creativity into all human endeavors.
• Artful Leadership, by Michael Jones
  Aims to empower leadership development and innovation by connecting the world of the performing arts and the business world.
• Authentic Conversations, by Jamie Showkier and Maren Showkier
  Authentic Conversations takes a radical new look at the potentially transformational role of workplace conversations.
• The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam
  Explains how to use visual-thinking tools to solve business problems and convey ideas with little more than a scrap of paper.
• Calling the Circle, by Christina Baldwin
  Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.
• The Change Handbook, Eds Peggy Holman, Steven Cady, and Tom Devane
  This definitive resource invites people and systems to gather around issues that they care about, unleashing the energy and wisdom to move their dreams into action.
• Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block
  Offers a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
  There are events in our life that have more influence than others, and often these decisive events are crucial conversations that we have with very important people in our life, be they personal or professional; This book teaches us how to manage and use these conversations to their full potential in order to build a better life.
• Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together, by William Isaacs
  Provides practical guidelines for one of the essential elements of true partnership–learning how to talk together in honest and effective ways.
• Engaging Emergence, by Peggy Holman
  Shows how to spot the emergence of a new level of order from the seemingly chaotic change and offers practices and principles that will help you align yourself and your organization with the new order.
• The Extraordinary Power of Leader Humility: Thriving Organizations & Great Results by Marilyn Gist
  Leadership is a relationship, and humility is the foundation for all healthy relationships. Leader humility can increase engagement and retention. It inspires and motivates. Gist offers a model of leader humility derived from three questions people ask of their leaders: Who are you? Where are we going? Do you see me? She explores each of these questions in depth, as well as the six key qualities of leader humility: a balanced ego, integrity, a compelling vision, ethical strategies, generous inclusion, and a developmental focus.
• The Facilitative Way, by Priscilla Wilson
  The Facilitative Way includes five approaches to working together more effectively.
• The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge
  Senge explains why the “learning organization” matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principles and offers some basic tools for practicing it.
• Finding Our Way, Meg Wheatley
  A comprehensive summing up of the thought of one of the most original and creative organizational thinkers of our time.
• Gracious Space, by Patricia Hughes
  Gracious Space is a simple yet powerful approach to working better together. Gracious Space can move organizations and communities forward, together, with deeper understanding and problem solving.
• Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies, by Bernardo M. Ferdman, Jeanine Prime, & Ronald E. Riggio
  Inclusive Leadership explores cutting-edge theory, research, practice, and experience on the pivotal role of leadership in promoting inclusion in diverse teams, organizations, and societies.
• Informal Learning, by Jay Cross
  This book offers advice on how to support, nurture, and leverage informal learning and helps trainers to go beyond their typical classes and programs.
• The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management, by Edna Pasher and Tuvya Ronen
  A straightforward guide to leveraging your company’s intellectual capital by creating a knowledge management culture.
• Making Questions Work, by Dorothy Strachan
  This book offers over 1700 rich questions that you can borrow or adapt to improve your inquiry skills, and provides clear frameworks that point to when, where, and why particular questions are most useful.
• Mapping Inner Space, by Nancy Margulies
• This introduction to visual note taking illustrates how relationships among various concepts are highlighted and more information can be recorded visually on a page.
• Mindful Leadership : The 9 Ways to Self-Awareness, Transforming Yourself, and Inspiring Others by Maria Gonzalez
  Become a true leader through Mindfulness If you thought leading a team or organization meant simply creating and implementing a financial plan, delegating responsibility, and watching the bottom line, well, you're only partly right. True leadership comes from within, a place of deep calm and focus, that allows you to respond to any situation as it arises. In Mindful Leadership , you'll learn how to draw on those inner reserves through Mindfulness Meditation, a tool you can use to achieve focus and clarity, reduce stress, and develop the presence of mind to meet any number of challenges.
• Nature and the Human Soul, by Bill Plotkin
  Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the patterns and rhythms of wild nature, a template for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.
• On Dialogue, by David Bohm
  This edition serves both as a practical working manual for those interested in engaging in Bohm’s conception of “dialogue” and a deeper exploration of Bohm’s dialogical world view.
• Power and Love, by Adam Kahane
  A new approach, proven in the field, for making progress on our most important and difficult collective challenges.
• The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly, by Alan Briskin, Sheryl Ericson, John Ott, and Tom Callanan
  An inspired and practical approach to developing the innate power of groups to make wise, compassionate, and creative decisions.
• Presence, by Betty Sue Flowers, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski. and Peter Senge
  This year-long series of conversations reveals the human capacity to “presence”—to pre-sense, to become present to an emerging future.
• Theory U, by Otto Scharmer
  By moving through the “U” process we learn to connect to our essential Self in the realm of “presencing”.
• The Thin Book of Naming Elephants, by Sue Annis Hammond & Andrea Mayfield
  This book shows how great companies create an environment that encourages and listens to input from all levels of the organization.
• Walk Out Walk On, by Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze
  Provides an intimate experience of how seven healthy and resilient communities took on intractable problems by working together in new and different ways.