No organizational leaders can succeed in today’s fast evolving and highly connected world on their own. To succeed, today’s leaders must not only optimize all their own faculties—mental sharpness, emotional depth, imagination, and creativity—but also utilize the full capacities of those around them in a collaborative and creative manner.

The prestigious contributors to this volume draw on psychology, sociology, neuroscience, social networking theory, organizational change theory, myths and traditions, and actual experiences to discover how leaders today achieve transformational results. The Transforming Leader offers an overview of what transformational leadership is, how it works, and how it is evolving. In doing so it reframes the challenge of leading in today’s interdependent, unpredictable world.

The Transforming Leader is written for people who strive to make a positive difference in the world. The book was conceived by the Fetzer Institute's Leadership for Transformation project in collaboration with the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership and the International Leadership Association. As part of the process that led to the book, the project's Stewardship Team held three retreats that brought together internationally known leaders, leadership educators, and theorists to sit in dialogue reflecting on three questions: How can we explore a variety of approaches to creating a bridge between our inner life and outer action for transformational effect? What is the commonality among these divergent approaches? And what of this can help you or me be an agent of transformation in a world on the edge of either destruction or renewal?

The leaders and leadership experts contributing to the book, many of whom participated in the dialogues, consistently stress their own experience that it is not just what a leader does that matters, or what they know about human beings, their motivations and ways of behavior, but who that leader is inside: How alive they are, how balanced, how healthy, how passionate, how aware, how engaged, how compassionate, how energized - how they connect with their deeper and wiser selves. Based on cutting edge leadership thinking and practice, the 20 essays that make up the work explore the many paths and lessons leaders can take to access the best parts of themselves and meet the challenges of today's world.

“Carol Pearson and her colleagues are moving my work on transforming leadership forward in interdisciplinary and contemporary ways.”
—James MacGregor Burns, Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential biographer and author of Transforming Leadership

“A wonderful collection of diverse and wise perspectives, giving shared voice to the need to understand ourselves and leadership from a much deeper place, using intelligence, compassion, and wise action to meet the challenges looming ahead.”
—Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science

“By significantly addressing the essential impact of the inner condition of leaders, The Transforming Leader adds to the ongoing work of illuminating the blind spot that has plagued the field for so long.”
—C. Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U and Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

“Here is an important and timely resource for all who have the courage to lead, written by people who know what they are talking about. May the book be widely read, and may the inner and outer practices it recommends be widely adopted.”
—Parker J. Palmer, author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, The Courage to Teach, and Let Your Life Speak