Welcome to Out of Control
This email newsletter is nominally about my forthcoming book, Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World. (coming September 23, 2021!) But it’s also about putting those ideas into practice.
Most leadership books promise to help you get control of your business, your career, and your life. In Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World, I flip this formula on its head.
Emergent order—order with no single individual or entity in control—surrounds us. From ant colonies to our brains, cities, and economies, emergent order sustains powerful and complex systems that no one designed and no one controls. Awash in this complexity, we have less control than we imagine or wish. My book explains how this emergent order confounds managers who grasp for control but holds great promise for leaders willing to adopt an emergent mindset.
Getting Out of Control explains why effective leaders seek to influence rather than to control. The book offers real-world examples of successful and failed leadership from Washington, D.C.‘s halls to Silicon Valley’s workstations. I boil it down to six principles of the emergent mindset to help leaders in public, corporate, or private life maximize their influence and avoid the pointless pursuit of control in this complex, out-of-control world.
I’ll be using this newsletter to occasionally drop news about the book, share thoughts about the process of writing, and to ask for feedback. I’m grateful you’ve joined me on this journey. But I need your help!
Help me build community of people applying the emergent mindset
I’ll be publishing content in the lead up to the book release, both here and in other places - but I’ll note all of it here. Never miss an update, stay on top of news about the book, and how I see the lessons of the book playing out in current events.
But I wrote the book as a means, not an end. I want to build a community of people who want to learn more about the limits of control and how that should affect our choices as individuals. I certainly don’t have all the answers - and I’m excited to engage with others who are exploring these issues and know that we can learn more together than we could apart.
Join me on this journey:
And share it with others!
