Building Inclusive Collaborative Organizations – A Career on Four Continents

In this fascinating professional memoir, the reader becomes an eyewitness as the author deploys an emergent change approach to institution building, across four continents and seven decades. Rolf Lynton works on a novel program of women’s employment in post-WWII textile industry in Scotland. Next, he and his partner Ronnie Lynton build an intensive but temporary community where men and women of diverse faiths and backgrounds live and learn together and then seed change throughout the developing world. There is also an engaging account of the creation of small industries development across newly independent India, despite significant opposition. After that project, Rolf designs an innovative school of public health in the American South, challenging many cultural norms based on ideas of what and for whom education should be. In the fifth of his six settings, he leads an international team to extend health care all across Indonesia and, in his last project, he and Ronnie return to India to expand a successful initiative, already helping thousands of the poorest of the rural poor. The human element, often missing from reports of why projects succeed or fail, is front and centre.

The author, Rolf Lynton, PhD, has spent his life helping communities address many of the transcendent challenges that face our world, including poverty, unemployment, public health, and discrimination. His distinctive approach to global problem solving was to create inclusive, collaborative, and innovative institutions through which people could bring about desperately needed changes and, by their own initiative, achieve a greater measure of social justice. His path-breaking and still innovative methods are showcased in this vivid first-person narrative survey of his adventurous career.