Think Outside the Building

How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Small Innovation at a Time

One of the leading business thinkers in the world offers a bold, new theory of advanced leadership for tackling the world's complex, messy, and recalcitrant social and environmental problems.

To address the big social and environmental issues of our day--from poverty, to race and gender disparities, to climate change--we need a different kind of leadership. Good leadership can help solve problems and guide an organization to success. But as Rosabeth Moss Kanter recognized, there is an enormous gap between "good leadership"--where individuals can use authority to get things done--and "advanced leadership"--where individuals possess the skills required for tackling complex, messy, and recalcitrant issues. Advanced leadership requires not just "thinking outside the box," but "thinking outside the building."

Over a decade ago, Kanter co-founded and has since directed Harvard's breakthrough Advanced Leadership Initiative. In this book, she combines extraordinary stories from the business world with a pragmatic tool kit to deliver a new theory of leadership for producing significant societal change, one that begins where conventional leadership thinking ends. We desperately need leaders with wisdom and experience willing to exercise their imaginations to create solutions to society's intractable problems. This book will teach them how.