Sustainability leadership - a labour of love

In my experience, pregnancy and child birth are quicker and less painful than writing a book, but the feeling when holding your new baby in your hands – whether it is your own flesh and blood or the product of sustainably managed forests – is remarkably similar. Both are a labour of love.

Next week sees the publication of my new book The Positive Deviant: Sustainability leadership in a perverse world. Born of my experience in setting up and developing the Forum’s Leadership in Sustainable Development masters, the book is largely in response to the very many people who have said ‘oh my, I wish I had the chance to do that course before I started work’.

The basic idea is that between the covers of the book, readers will find sufficient knowledge, ideas, and tools to build up their own sustainability-literate leadership personality and get started on Monday. For those already knowledgeable there are new angles, ideas, and ways of thinking that will help you be ever more confident in your leadership, but the main message is that none of us can know it all; we just need to know enough to ensure that more often than not we are deciding for rather than against sustainability.

The odd title of the book comes from my other major theme, that of leadership strategies for anyone with sustainability as an objective. As well as exploring the many byways and odd highway in leadership development over the last half century or so (and offering a robust critique of business schools and corporate responsibility on the way) I conclude that a new 21st century approach to leadership is needed if it – as all leadership must be from now on – is to be sustainability-driven. We can’t wait for the right international treaties or co-ordinated national government initiatives – all that looks further away than ever. So doing the right thing for sustainability despite the perversity of the world around us – the wrong institutions, policies, processes and legions of uncooperative people – has become the best strategy from now on.

Since floating the idea that sustainability-literate leadership will, almost by definition, have to operate positive deviant strategies I have been delighted to discover that there are lots of people who feel the same way. In their reflections on leadership, this year’s Forum students even found several when they were out on placement. There has been talk of striking a black and yellow badge (to match the cover of the book) with the letters PD, so positive deviants can identify each other and so collaborate on ways to clamber over or round the barriers to shifting to a more sustainable way of doing things.

Now the book is out the next labour of the author starts: selling the thing. If you are quick, you can still get the special 25% discount off the cover price of £24.99 up to noon on 28th July. You can order through the Forum website (see the promotion in the left hand column of our home page) or via the Earthscanwebsite directly, using the FF25 voucher code. After the 28th you can still get a 20% discount using the code FF20.

I’m donating my royalties back to Forum for the Future so we can train up more positive deviants amongst our students and partners.

SARA PARKIN