Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul

by David M. Castro, Robert Rimm (Editor)

This groundbreaking book by David Castro, President and CEO of the Institute for Leadership Education, promises to transform thinking within organizations and communities about the fundamental skills required for human progress. David explores the evolution of leadership skills within effective organizations, recognizing that leadership processes have been evolving into different and more promising practices. To capture this trend, David introduces a new concept and a new word, genership, which describes the skill set required for the practice of creativity in groups.

Distinguishing genership from its ancestor practices, David unmasks a series of highly dysfunctional fallacies underlying the more traditional concept of leadership. These include the Messiah Fallacy, the Hero Fallacy and the Fallacy of Leadership Nostalgia, a false triumvirate severely suppressing human creativity. David posits that human progress will ultimately require organizations to transcend leadership in favor of genership as a core practice within creative communities. With vivid and relevant examples, David surveys the fundamental capacities underlying genership, contrasting them with traditional leadership processes. Genership provides a practical guide to transcending outdated ways associated with traditional leadership cultures while embracing the emergent and more effective practices described in genership.

483 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 15, 2012

About the author

Dave Castro is a father, husband, Quaker, and entrepreneur who has been enchanted with the plays of Shakespeare since he was a teenager in Brooklyn. His other books include Genership: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul and The Inward Sun, which lays out a coherent set of seven foundational practices to implement, a vocabulary of action to realize our shared potential.