Head: (4.5 of 5)
Heart: (5 of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (4 of 5)
In this, her 16^th book, Frances Moore Lappe has written a thin but mighty tome that attempts to fundamentally change the way people think.  She poses a "reframe" of our core beliefs and assumptions much in the way that leadership coaches attempt to move clients out of stuck points by asking questions that lead to shifts in perspective.  In order to reframe your assumptions, you must first understand what those assumptions are-and Lappe asks us to peel back the layers all the way to the most basic mental concepts we have about reality.  Why should we bother?  Because if the frame we hold is destructive, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  "Cultures live or die...not by violence, or by chance, but ultimately by ideas," she says.

The dominant frame of society today, Lappe claims, is one of lack-a lack of goods and resources in the world and of goodness in human nature.  What we need to do, Lappe says, is to replace this frame with one built on the premise that there are plenty of goods and resources to go around. "As we come to appreciate and enjoy nature's laws, learning to live within a self-renewing ecological home, we discover there's more than enough for all to live well," she says. Let's look for the goodness IN human nature, rather than debating whether it is good or bad, Lappe says. The good traits she sees include deep needs for fairness, cooperation, effectiveness, and meaning. We are, in fact, capable of learning the skills of deliberate problem-solving, she says, and when we do, democracy becomes no longer a fixed structure but an evolving, values-driven culture we create.  Market rules, set democratically, can keep wealth widely dispersed, so that the markets remain open, competitive and life-serving; political influence is freed from wealth's influence, and more and more people have a voice in problem solving.  Power and connections grow, enabling progress in resolving crises, reinforcing the liberating premise of abundance.

Because Lappe's book can be read on multiple levels, there are at least two ways to apply Lappe's ideas of democracy to leadership in business.  One is to look at your job as just one of many roles you play in a participatory democracy: you can enrich your leadership role at work by putting effort into active citizenship within your community, gaining skills outside of work and helping to change the wider world in which your company operates.  The other way to apply her ideas is to realize that her ideas of what a rich, living democracy looks and feels like match what many in leadership aspire to create in the companies they lead.  Both democracy and leadership are sets of system qualities driven by core human values, rather than set systems; thus, her list of "Ten Arts of Democracy" can translate directly to ten arts of leadership:

1) Active Listening: Encouraging the speaker and searching for meaning.
2) Creative Conflict: Confronting others in ways that produce growth.
3) Mediation: Facilitating interaction to help people in conflict hear one another.
4) Negotiation: Problem solving that meets some key interests of all involved.
5) Political imagination: Re-imaging our futures according to our values.
6) Public Dialogue: Public talk on matters that concern us all.
7) Public Judgment: Public decision making that allows citizens [employees] to make choices they are willing to help implement.
8) Celebration: Expressing joy and gratitude for what we learn as well as what we achieve.
9) Evaluation and Reflection: Assessing and incorporating the lessons we learn through action.
10) Mentoring: Supportively guiding others in learning these arts of [leadership].