Acknowledgements

Our primary acknowledgment is, of course, to the thoughtful and committed contributors to this volume. Their time is as precious as the world’s need for their services is insatiable. Yet they decided to enter into this deep and demanding dialogue, which will continue on our ongoing journey of discovery. Each of them has not only contributed their writing, but has participated in many exchanges that have nourished these essays. We thank them for their insight, and for the trust in us as their co-editors. Without any one of them, our chorus would be missing a crucial voice.

In addition, this book would not exist without the profound support of key organizational allies that believe in this project.

This book was conceived within the Global Leadership Network (GLN), which unites some of the world’s most senior leadership practitioners. Over the past years we have cooperated on various projects and dialogued in an ongoing manner about the theme of global leadership. Whether they are contributors to this volume or not, every GLN member has enriched our understanding. We thank each of them for their partnership and their commitment to this work. We also want to personally thank Katia Miller, who has been the coordinator of GLN activities, for her masterful role in supporting our work on this manuscript and the overall book design; and Ben Levi, for his meticulous copyediting and process management. (For more information about the GLN, please see the addendum of this book or go to www.globalleadershipnetwork.net)

The actual publication of this first edition of Leadership Is Global was made possible by the Shinnyo-en Foundation. In addition to providing financial support and creative partnership, the Foundation’s key officers, Haru Inouye and Liane Louie-Badua, are contributors to this volume as well. They also encouraged us to document the process of developing this book, which led to the making of a video and multi-media package that captures the power of the co-authors engaging with each other in person, and also addresses our work on developing a series of global leadership curricula. We express our deepest thanks to the Foundation and hope that this book reflects their vision and values as much as ours. (For more information about the Foundation, please see the addendum of this book or go to www.sef.org.) We would also like to thank our other funders whose work indirectly supported the unfolding of this book but of whom there are too many to list them all. Finally, we want to express our gratitude to Commonweal and to the Omega Institute. Several of our earliest GLN meetings took place at Commonweal (www.commonweal.org), a remarkable conference center that generously placed their facilities and themselves in service to this project. A meeting of the contributors to this book also took place at the Omega Institute (www.eomega.org). And follow-up meetings to further develop our work are already planned there. This book is much stronger and clearer because they shared our commitment to global citizenship and invited us to hold this and other critical meetings under their auspices.

In closing, the three of us want to thank the many people who in our respective organizations, networks and lives enabled us to dedicate the time and energy to bring this book from vision to reality. In truth, this book bears witness to a vision that many of our colleagues share. We thank them for their encouragement, and for the privilege of introducing these global citizens to you.

Walter Link

Thais Corral

Mark Gerzon

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