Introduction

A generation ago, more than a dozen women from around the world wrote a book called Sisterhood Is Global. What drew these writers together was a common purpose: to reinvent the role of women to become respected and empowered partners in shaping the future of humanity. They helped to bridge the divide between women and men, opened our hearts and inspired our minds. It is out of respect for this movement and others like it, which crucially advanced our civilization, that we chose the title for our book.

Some of the co-authors in Leadership Is Global were instrumental in advancing the course of women’s empowerment, which is ongoing. Other co-authors are reinventing governance, business and economic development, strengthening civil society, innovating in education, and helping to bridge diverse sectors and cultures. What they all have in common is their 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 in her or his own life.

We believe that around the globe there is a new paradigm of civilization and leadership emerging. The twenty-one essays in this book collectively bring this paradigm to life. They reflect the richness and diversity of the world itself, and invite you to join us in our journey of discovery and co-creation.

No single author, from any one nation or culture, profession or sector, can possibly hope to capture the awesome complexity of the changing patterns of leadership in today’s world. We all are limited by our own personal experiences and cultural backgrounds. We need each other to collectively assemble the mosaic and to develop it further. For this reason, the three of us who have co-edited this volume — Walter Link from Europe, Thais Corral from Latin America and Mark Gerzon from North America, who all have lived and worked in many countries — have brought together this diverse group of leading thinkers and practitioners from throughout the world to explore this new paradigm of civilization and leadership together. Within the limitations of a single volume, we believe that the diversity of their collective wisdom and experience is of a rare richness both in terms of range and depth.

While each of the voices in this volume approaches global leadership in its unique way, they share a powerful common essence. They all:

Advocate worldviews that focus on the whole, and bridge across countries and cultures, disciplines and sectors.
Explore the relationships between the local and the global, the personal and universal.
Seek pragmatic, yet inspired solutions, rather than following ideological or fundamentalist dogma.
Move beyond heroic individualism to collective intelligence and collaborative action.
Acknowledge the integrity of heart and mind, body and soul.

We believe the questions these essays raise are critical to the lives of leaders, regardless of whether or not they operate locally, nationally, or globally, in government, business or civil society. The perspectives you will encounter in the following pages will broaden your perspective, introduce you to new ways of seeing the world, and raise your awareness — as they have raised ours — about how to truly be a global citizen, as an individual and as an organization.

For too many of us today, “global” simply means projecting our own particular beliefs, values and perspectives on the world around us. Instead of realizing that “global” requires awakening to a new and integral dimension of reality, we too often assume that we can apply to the world the preconceived attitudes we have inherited from our families and cultures, from our professions or political ideologies. In fact, this is not “global” thinking at all. It is merely applying our own parochial perspectives to a larger geographic scale. Instead, we need to hear and learn from each other. In dialogue, we need to find solutions that come from our shared humanity and support our joint sustainability. These 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. Those distinctions can be as divisive and often more unconscious than the national borders we are used to acknowledging.

Taken together, these essays will challenge every one of us to rethink what “global” actually means. They invite us on an inner as well as an outer journey into the diversity of leadership and the world. While they are filled with information, their real value is not data, but perspective, real life experiences and concern for each other. After all, one can amass large amounts of information, and then simply use it to further one’s own personal ambition, corporate strategy, national agenda, or ethnic and religious identity. In contrast, these contributions will wake us up to the challenge of connecting to, and acting from, our shared humanity.

For years, many of the authors had already worked and dialogued together in various constellations. When we decided to collaborate on this book, the power of our collective experience inspired all of us. For days, we sat together after having read each other’s work, and we explored the implications. In the presence of this diverse global team, we reaffirmed that no single one of us had “the answer,” but that together, all of us could begin to see a pattern of emergence, a pattern that allows us to shift from hierarchy to co-creation, from domination to partnership, from ego-centered to collective and essential consciousness, from fear-driven to love-based — from a civilization that is fundamentally unsustainable to one that could work for all, including for future generations and all of nature.

But to create such a humane and sustainable world, we will need leaders who envision and embody it, and then work to make it happen. We need leaders who ask themselves: “What does it mean to think and lead globally?” Even though the adjective “global” — and its noun counterpart, “globalization” — is on everyone’s lips, there is too little discussion about what a global leader is. This book is intended to catalyze precisely this much needed conversation. By picking it up and beginning to read it, you have joined a dialogue with some of the most concerned and experienced global leadership practitioners. It has been our privilege to come to know them, learn from and with them. We are extremely pleased to share their wisdom with you. As you read their essays, you will notice that our editing has avoided making them all sound the same. Some write in the style of academia and other professional circles, some offer more personal experiences and stories. While we have adjusted their English to some degree, we have attempted to leave the diversity of their voices intact, offering you a wide variety of styles, as well as content.

And let us be clear from the outset, this is not a volume filled with final answers. Rather, we offer you to join us in co-creative inquiry into the questions we believe humanity is facing, and must face, if we are to flourish together in our beautiful yet fragile home. We ask these questions in the fervent hope that our inquiry will help foster the kind of leadership our local cultures need to mutually enhance each other in our planetary civilization. Come join us. Perhaps together we can find the answers for which we are all searching, and, as a result, leave behind a world for our children that is more humane and dynamically sustainable.

In the Conclusion, we leave you with a number of questions to ponder; you may wish to read them now or after the executive summary so you can have the questions in mind as you read the essays.

The Co-Editors:

Walter Link, Thais Corral and Mark Gerzon

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