My book Blending Leadership: Six Simple Beliefs for Leading Online and Off, co-authored with Reshan Richards, has been resurfacing and making the rounds these days. We wrote it to be as timeless as possible, which is why I think it can be timely now, as the context in which we all live and work keeps changing. Here’s what I had to say back in 2016 about its surface and more subterranean goals.

In Blending Leadership, Dr. Reshan Richards and I examine and articulate the intersection of organizational leadership, learning, and technology, framing the choices that all leaders have as they attempt to serve the people they lead and their institutions.

We wrote the book for a surface audience of school leaders and a real audience of those who lead learning at any organization. 

Like A River Runs Through it or Old Man and the Sea, it’s a book about one thing on the surface — school leadership — and something else underneath — the situation in which some human beings find themselves in charge of other human beings.  It uses the surface story to get to the real story, which is that leaders have a deep responsibility to the people they lead.  Often, they control people’s time and the range of options they have to exercise their talents, day in and day out.  That’s pretty serious business, in my opinion.  Leadership is deeply moral; that doesn’t change when it is mediated through technology.  

With that said, we offer six simple beliefs to help leaders thrive in a world where technology is everywhere.  As leaders, we shouldn’t be afraid of this encroachment; we should understand it so as to thrive in it — to take advantage of all the tools that are available to us to help our organizations succeed.