Randal Joy Thompson – författare

We live in an era of drastic changes in relationships between countries and of unprecedented responses to both old and emerging global challenges. Working alongside leaders in developing countries, leaders in international foreign aid and development organizations, non-governmental organizations, and private foundations and companies have driven dramatic changes in our approach to these challenges and to international development more generally. Yet little has been written from the perspective of the leaders telling their stories about leading and navigating the tangle of forces acting upon the course of international development. And even less is known about how leading in international development contexts should be modelled in a way that fosters the development of the next generation of leaders. Leadership and Power in International Development: Navigating the Intersections of Gender, Culture, Context, and Sustainability brings scholarship up-todate with practice, collecting the stories and reflections of twenty leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe, Canada, and the United States, many of whom have extensive experience leading within major international organizations. In clear, straightforward narratives, the contributors gathered here highlight their diverse experiences with context, culture, power, gender and sustainability, and they offer strategies and lessons learned derived from their own challenges and successes. Building on these narratives, the book offers a new model or framework for leading in international development contexts. Through an innovative practice to theory process, the first chapter of the book, written by co-editor Julia Storberg-Walker, provides an original analysis of the chapter narratives, and presents a framework for successfully leading international development projects in the 21st century. The framework can be used for designing leadership development programs as well as for future research in leading in international development contexts.Leadership and Power in International Development is essential reading for development leaders, practitioners, and scholars as they continue to confront the complexity of contemporary power-politics.

In our rapidly evolving "complexponential" world, where complexity and exponential change intersect, traditional leadership models are failing us. Drawing profound wisdom from nature's patterns and ancient Taoist principles, The Four Forces reveals how emergent generative team leadership can transform teams and organizations. Self-organizing, autonomous teams exercise this team-led leadership close to stakeholders where responsive decisions matter most.At the heart of this revolutionary approach lie four fundamental forces that mirror nature's own organizing principles. When team members align with intent, clear purpose that guides without constraining, they create space for authentic emergence. Through hope, they cultivate resilience and possibility thinking that enables teams to navigate uncertainty with confidence. Care becomes the nurturing force that allows individual talents to flourish while maintaining collective coherence. And love emerges as the binding energy that creates unshakeable connection, trust, and commitment.Perhaps most critically, this book illuminates how relationships become the stabilizing anchor in our turbulent times. Just as ecosystems derive their resilience from interconnected webs of relationship, teams that prioritize authentic human connection find stability amid chaos. These relational foundations do not constrain change, they enable it, creating the psychological safety and mutual trust necessary for true innovation and adaptation.The Four Forces offers leaders a pathway beyond command-and-control toward something far more powerful: the ability to ignite collective intelligence, foster genuine collaboration, and create organizations that thrive in complexity rather than merely survive it. This is leadership that works with life's natural flow rather than against it.

Throughout history women have struggled to reclaim their bodies from the meanings and assaults imposed on them by cultural practices, sexual mores, victimization, and concepts of how their bodies should be presented and managed in public, to intimate male partners, or in the workplace. Despite the images and expectations imposed on their bodies, women are increasingly claiming their bodies as their own through embodied somatic leadership, in protesting injustice, in promoting peace, and in working in a so-called “man’s world.” Why has embodied somatic leadership more recently become highlighted, and what conditions in the world have brought this approach to leadership under study and scrutiny?Women Embodied Leaders answers these questions, analyzing models of embodied somatic leadership, and how women use this leadership from a number of perspectives. The wholistic treatment of this leadership is a useful tool not only for researchers, practitioners, and activists, but also for educators in the fields of leadership and social justice.The Transformative Women Leaders Series is published in collaboration between the International Leadership Association (ILA) and Emerald Publishing. Celebrating women leaders and the leadership styles they employ to achieve success, the books in this series highlight successful context-specific leadership approaches and the moral qualities of endurance.

Capitalism is in crisis and, according to some, on the verge of collapse. Will this dying system give way to a commons-centric society as many scholars and activists predict? Will leadership become an antedated function, no longer needed in the self-organized, collaborative commons? These questions inspired the author of Proleptic Leadership on the Commons: Ushering in a New Global Order to explore the history of the commons movement, the recent systems frameworks that carve out a transformational commons path forward, and the leadership theories that honor the chaos and complexity of our times and encourage emergent change toward a more egalitarian society based on care, obligation, and collaboration. Viewing the commons as a vehicle for a new world order, Randal Joy Thompson proposes ‘proleptic leadership’, which envisions how leaders will continue to be essential in a commons-centric world as the custodians of responsible agency and conscious choice. Mapping out how leaders can achieve higher levels of consciousness and traverse liminal space in order to be ethical and caring agents of change, this book challenges us to reflect on our commitment to creating a more nurturing future, and evaluate how our own qualities might help manifest, or perhaps hinder, that future.