Power and Potential (Social Leadership Guidebooks)
Description
This book is not an instruction manual, nor an answer. It's an Enquiry Framework: a set of related questions that provide scaffolding - or form a space - for us to explore the nature, operation, and shape of our power.
To be a leader is to hold power, but the type of power that you hold, and where you hold it, is not set in stone. Some power may be held structurally, within the hierarchy, given to you by the Organisation you work for, and arranged into rules, systems, process, and mechanisms of consequence and control.
Other types of power are unwritten, held within our reputation in the community, or through the influence, or coer‐ cion, that comes from seniority or expertise, stories, or beliefs.
Power is complex: it is not a one-dimensional force, but a multidimensional one. Sometimes the different forms of power that we hold in these different dimensions can operate against one another, while at other times they can be mutually exclusive. For example, you may fail to be authentic in your own beliefs and concurrently obedient within a formal system.
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Person
Julian Stodd is an author, and founder of Sea Salt Learning, a global learning consultancy helping organisations adapt and thrive in the Social Age. Much of his consultancy work is around core elements of the Social Age: the need for Social Leadership, the design of Scaffolded Social Learning, planning for Organisational Change and the impacts of Social Collaborative Technology.
Julian comes from an academic background in communication theory, psychology and neurophysiology, learning design, educational psychology, museum education and philosophy. He is a proud global mentor with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, and a Trustee of Drake Music, a charity that works to break down disabling barriers to music through education and research. He was awarded the Learning Performance Institute 'Colin Corder Award for Services to Learning' in 2016.
At its highest level, his work covers documenting the changes of the Social Age and sense-making what we do about it, and ranges from leadership to learning, culture to change, trust to humility. He has written ten books so far, including 'The Social Leadership Handbook', 'Exploring the World of Social Learning' and 'A Mindset for Mobile Learning', plus a Guidebook series each of which explores different aspects of Organisational design and change. All are under 10,000 words and include sections on 'what you need to know', and 'what you need to do about it'.
