For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership

For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership has been honored with a 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award (in the current events/social change category) and has been named a finalist for the Foreword Reviews book of the year award in social science.


For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership is about the ideas that drive the work of the Kansas Leadership Center. The authors, David D. Chrislip and Ed O'Malley, share their belief that 'civic leadership' needs to become more purposeful, provocative and engaging in order to cope with today's civic challenges and to help transform the civic culture of our communities and regions. Chrislip and O'Malley use the real-life leadership dilemmas of five Kansans to bring these ideas to life.
 
The book's title, For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership, suggests its orientation. Rather than viewing the exercise of leadership in the civic arena as a way of furthering individual desires or acting only when your backyard is threatened, the authors see it as a means of sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good. In the end, limiting one's conception of the meaning of civic responsibility to a reactive or passive role most often allows for a lot of noisy complaining while leaving the responsibility for taking initiative and action to others or to local authorities. A great deal more than complaining is needed from many more of us if progress is to be made on the issues we care about.
 
In these pages, you will find Chrislip and O'Malley's assessment of the current state of civic leadership along with a framework for the more powerful kind of leadership we believe necessary to respond to these conditions. Their purpose is both to redefine civic leadership and to understand how its practice can help trans­form the civic culture of our communities and regions. To this end, the book is organized in three parts.
 
In Part I: The State of Civic Leadership, the authors tell the story of the Kansas Leadership Center, how it originated and developed as a laboratory for learning about civic leader­ship.
 
Part II: The Practice of Civic Leadership introduces four competencies of civic leadership that respond to today's civic challenges.
 
In the last section, Part III: The Heart of Civic Leadership, Chrislip and O'Malley suggest what it will take from you to learn how to become more effective at exercising civic leadership, and in the final chapter they return our focus to the book's title -- For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership -- to explore how to realize the full potential of civic leadership.
 
The book is written for anyone who cares enough about his community or her region to want to make a difference. The subtle, powerful, risky and challenging-to-put-into-practice ideas and concepts can help you become more conscious and intentional about the way you exercise civic leadership, and thus help you make more progress on the concerns you care about.

In many ways, David Chrislip and Ed O'Malley are an unlikely pair to write a book together. David is a Democrat, Ed's a Republican. Ed uses a PC, David works on a Mac. David's a cyclist, Ed's a runner. Ed is in his 30s, David in his 60s. Because Kansas is Ed's home state and David has deep roots there, it's a place near and dear to both their hearts.
 
Although they share a deep passion for working for the common good, their experiences in civic life have been quite different. David's civic leadership has primarily been in multi-stakeholder, cross-sector collaboration at the community and regional level, while Ed's work has primarily been through government and politics.
 
David has spent 35 years engaging with the concept of civil society and in the work of civic leadership and collabora­tion. His career has taken him from the National Outdoor Leadership School and Outward Bound to the American Leadership Forum to the National Civic League. He's worked with hundreds of communities and organizations across this country as well as internationally and has conducted leader­ship development programs for thousands of people seeking to exercise civic leadership more effectively.

Younger than David but unable to keep up with him on a bicycle, Ed is a politician turned leadership developer. He's had a front-row seat to effective and ineffective civic leadership while serving as an aide to a Kansas governor and as a young state legislator. As president and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center, Ed is guiding an effort unlike anything seen before in America. In no other place has there been such a concentrated effort to cultivate civic leadership at an unprecedented statewide scale supported by sustained funding.
 
They've spent countless hours working together, along with many close colleagues and hundreds of Kansans engaged in civic life through the work and programs of the Kansas Leadership Center. This book reflects their experiences.