10 Years of Social Leadership

Ten years ago today, in our cramped office above The Winchester pub, I signed for a delivery of two large crates, containing the preview copies of the Social Leadership Handbook (1st Edition).

It was not my first book, but it was to be the one that catapulted some of my ideas into a much broader community, and which formed the foundation of my subsequent work on the Social Age and the idea of the Socially Dynamic Organisation.

Ten years feels like both a long time, and hardly any time at all. In my own work, with twenty one books published, I feel as though I have only laid down the foundations. But it’s also a body of work of which I am extremely proud, not particularly because it is ‘good’, but rather because it remains fluid and in motion.

The 1st Edition was my first illustrated book, with illustrations that I now view as embarrassingly poor, and also my first and only book that incorporated a model. But despite the deficiencies, it sparked a great deal of interest, and a host of conversations, which carried me across 46 different countries to share that work.

The 2nd Edition, published in 2016, significantly expanded on that original work, and has remained a mainstay of my work to this day. But my work has not remained static: I’m currently developing publishing plans for 2025, which will include an entirely new Social Leadership book, as well as key texts on ‘Culture Weaving’, ‘Learning Science’, and some key work on ‘Belonging’, and I’ll be sharing more around those plans next week.

I’m proud of where the Social Leadership Handbook has taken me to in my thinking and practice: I shared it in the Steve Jobs theatre in Cupertino, and in the old ballroom at the Blackpool Tower. I presented it in the Siam Cement Company in Malaysia, and to a raucous group in Vienna, mid winter. I carried a copy into the Pentagon, and bought a second hand copy from an Oxfam shop in Basingstoke (signed by myself). I was kind of happy to see it continuing it’s journey!

That early Social Leadership work holds a nativity, but also a welcome simplicity. Subsequent work has become, at times, too complex, but also more pragmatic and grounded.

I followed up publication of that book with ‘Social Leadership: My 1st 100 Days’, as a very practical body of work, taking the ideas into practice, and in my current project on ‘Social Leadership Daily’, which is dialogic and deeply grounded in everyday application and ideas.

The next book will build on all of this, with a focus on the environment in which we lead, the nature of the intersection of systems, and ideas of ‘motion’ and ‘boundary’. But today I am enjoying the memory of that 1st Edition, and how proud, and nervous I was, when it landed.