News and Reviews
To Be a Servant-Leader
Stephen Prosser, Paulist Press 2007 ISBN 978-0-8091-4467-9
To Be a Servant-Leader is a welcome and important addition to the burgeoning litany of books on servant-leadership. It is a challenging, detailed, and sometimes provocative examination of the philosophy and practicality of the subject, illustrating from the very outset that servant-leadership is not for the faint hearted. The fact that the book comes in at less than one hundred pages might lull the less than attentive to the thought that this is an easy read. It is not. It is a thorough assessment of the values most usually associated with the servant-leader and how these values are lived out. In addition, through a series of questions, it provides something of a checklist, a continuing measurement of how you are doing. Quakers who read To Be a Servant-Leader will find some echoes of their Advices and Queries, a book designed to ensure consistency of principle and a means by which this may be quietly tested. In some ways To Be a Servant-Leader represents Greenleaf’s best test writ large, and applied to all activities and aspects of organisational and personal life. In this context it brings to mind Jim Autry’s contention that life is integrated, not segregated, and one’s values must be applied equally in all settings.
The author notes that when he had prepared the first draft he sent it to a number of colleagues and friends to seek their views as to the nature and content of what he had written. One replied that it was like “trying to eat a whole Stilton,” and so it is. There is a great deal to this book, but the reader would find it worthwhile – as Stephen himself suggests – taking it gradually, one or two chapters at a time. I had known for some time that this book was on the way. The wait has been well worth it.
John Noble, November 2007
Living System – Making sense of sustainability
Bruce Nixon, Management Books, 2000, ISBN 1-85252-519-3
This is an extraordinary and invaluable book that offers an original approach and fresh insights to a subject that is now, rightly, attracting so much attention. Whilst painstaking in its portrayal of the systemic problems facing the planet, and clear about the implications that these present to us, this is nevertheless a profoundly optimistic work, an affirmation of the good in people and their ability to heal the system. Bruce presents both the positive and the “dark side” to each of the elements of sustainability (environmental, social and economic) but his simple assertion that the creative energy is love is the sense that for me overwhelmingly wins through. His meticulous research has yielded a veritable mountain of facts and statistics that, in other writing, would be daunting indeed. However, Bruce has found a way of presenting this wealth of data, making it as accessible as it is significant.
I found myself – not for the first time in reading his work – agreeing out loud with much of what Bruce writes. There is a need to put aside the damaging and debilitating “blame culture” that has become so pervasive in the past several years and to rediscover the balance of body, mind, heart and spirit in all our enterprises. We do need to see sustainability as a long-term undertaking, and not left to the short termism of politics. At the end of the book Bruce offers no easy solutions, but presents practical and positive ways in which each of us can begin to address the challenges facing us. His approach brings to mind a quotation from the 20th century American Quaker, Rufus Jones, who once said: “I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.”
In essence Living System – making sense of sustainability is a call for personal transformation, a comprehensive explanation as to why it is so imperative, and a tantalising vision of how different everything could look in the brave new world that would emerge.
John Noble