Retail Price: $28.00 LS Price: $28.00 You Save: $0.00 (0%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours Format: Paperback, 272pp. ISBN: 9781596270428 Publisher: Seabury Books Pub. Date: February 2007 Average Customer Review:

Order This Book!   Secure Order Guarantee Item No: 9781596270428

Ten years after his death, Edwin Friedman's insights into leadership are more urgently needed than ever. He was the first to tell us that all organizations have personalities, like families, and to apply the insights of family therapy to churches and synagogues, rectors and rabbis, politicians and teachers. Failure of Nerve is essential reading for all leaders, be they parents or presidents, corporate executives or educators, religious superiors or coaches, healers or generals, managers or clergy.

Friedman's insights about our regressed, "seatbelt society," oriented toward safety rather than adventure, help explain the sabotage that leaders constantly face today. Suspicious of the "quick fixes" and instant solutions that sweep through our culture only to give way to the next fad, he argues for strength and self-differentiation as the marks of true leadership. His formula for success is more maturity, not more data; stamina, not technique; and personal responsibility, not empathy.

This book was unfinished at the time of Friedman's death, and originally published in a limited edition. This new edition makes his life-changing insights and challenges to a new generation of readers.

• "This book is for parents and presidents. It is also for CEO's and educators, prioresses and coaches, healers and generals, managers and clergy. It is about leadership in the land of the quick-fix, about leadership in a society so reactivethat it cannot choose leaders who might calm its anxiety. It is about the need for clarity and decisiveness. It is for leaders who have questioned the widespread triumphing of data over maturity, technique over stamina, and empathy over personal responsibility. And it is for anyone at all who has become suspicious of the illusions of change -- suspicious of the modern fashion wherein solutions, as well as symptoms, burst upon us in every field of endeavor (management, healing, education, parenting) and then disappear as unexpectedly as they had first appeared, only to be supplanted by the fad of another "issue" or cure, sending everyone back to square one. The emphasis here will be on strength, not pathology, on challenge, not comfort, on self-differentiation, not herding for togetherness. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in a "seatbelt society" more oriented toward safety than adventure." From Introduction

• "Yet despite the fact that the preservation of self has proved vital to the preservation of life both biologically and politically, the force for individuality is suspect when it comes to human institutions. As I have tried to demonstrate, it is not necessary to have authoritarian dictators to destroy the integrity of a democratic society's citizens. One only has to keep escalating the togetherness-promoting anxiety so that the individuality is not only squelched, it becomes instinctively feared. This is true generally and all the more so in critically anxious societies. The emphasis on family togetherness and team building in our culture has value, but that is not what is needed"

... "the evolution of a society requires that the universal tension between the forces of individuality and the forces for togetherness must be kept within some balance range. But when that balance goes beyond certain thresholds, as occurs in periods of chronic anxiety, then-whether we are considering an individual organism, a specific institution , or society itself-we wind up not with evolutionary processes but with the devolutionary extremes of totalitarianism or anarchy, tyranny or tumors"

... "Its is only when self is valued that leaders can be les at the mercy of the data/technique deluge, no less its addictive properties. It is only when leaders value self that their cortex can be kept from the service of the reptilian brain and the cerebration can be true thinking." From Pg 173 Reader: Eric Keck from Montpelier

Edwin H. Friedman was an ordained rabbi and practicing family therapist. His ground-breaking volume Generation to Generation, which exposed the connections between emotional process at home and at work in religious, educational, therapeutic, and business systems, has become a modern classic. In great demand as a consultant and public speaker throughout the country, he lived in Washington DC. He died in 1996.

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Editor's Preface	ix
	Introduction: The Problem with Leadership	1
1	Imaginative Gridlock and the Spirit of Adventure	29
2	A Society in Regression	51
3	Data Junkyards and Data Junkies: The Fallacy of Expertise	95
4	Survival in a Hostile Environment: The Fallacy of Empathy	132
5	Autocracy Versus Integrity: The Fallacies of Self	158
6	Take Five	187
7	Emotional Triangles
8	Crisis and Sabotage: The Keys to the Kingdom	229
	Epilogue: The Presence of the Past	248
	Index	253

Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value • Paperback