There is no shortage of business books.  However, they assume that commercial or political success is enough when for us, it is not.  Few acknowledge our need for positive impact. Furthermore, most are written by people who cast themselves as unassailable experts despite coming from a perspective of myopic privilege and lived experience that most of us cannot respect or relate to.  Moreover, what these experts have celebrated as business excellence is precisely what created the problems that we are on borrowed time to solve.  Yet they have not owned up to this, so we don’t trust them.  

There is also no shortage of books on social and environmental causes. However, while resonating with our passion, they tend to pit us against the mainstream we strive to influence. 

Increasingly, there are also books that speak to the heart of change-makers. They guide us towards self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and vulnerability. However, most result in what feels like a sugar high because they do nothing for our entrepreneurship skills or the vital savvy of seeing around the corner.  We may crash harder for having read them.

I wrote this book because I could not find one that addressed the entire spectrum of a change-maker’s experience;  a book that would have answered what has been building up to an avalanche of questions I found myself asking and, increasingly, fielding.

Today, a change-maker must identify, digest, and apply a breadth of fragmented knowledge: economics, social psychology, organizational design, marketing, entrepreneurship, game and decision science, perhaps with a touch of geopolitics. To make meaningful, sustained change, you must understand the intersectional issues at play; know how to design a pathway to wholesale change that is as actionable as it is dynamic; be an expert entre- or intrapreneur; be charismatic enough to activate teams if not thousands of people to advance your vision and yet mellow enough to secure low-interest financing; spend money to make money but so well that they offer you more; know how to scale and how to let go; and be equally comfortable leading as you are falling into the background.

It is an awful lot.  Especially since there is no structured way for us to build on each other’s progress.  There isn’t a syllabus designed today to graduate change-makers. Centuries into this, we still psych ourselves up for BASE jumping with a handmade parachute. Driven to make the world a better place, we jump off the cliff, under- (if not completely un-) prepared.

Still, if you fell short in any aspect of this – and how could you not? – it may feel like your entire vision will collapse. Given your wiring, you would probably feel guilty irrespective of how unrealistic your vision was from the beginning. 

What’s worse is that we don’t even know why we feel compelled to jump. We don’t know – like I didn’t – that we’re change-makers;  a profession no less legitimate for the little recognition it garners. 

This ends now!

Change-making is a wiring, a calling, and a choice but it is also a discipline and a trade that must be treated as such. For too long, our impact has been the unlikely upside of a nearly assured self-destruction;  an incidental byproduct rather than the planned outcome of our effort. 

I wrote this book because we can do better than to relegate change to chance. 

We need to get recognized, trained, and resourced.

Change-making is as exhilarating as it is brutal. But the world misses out when change-makers fumble and stall, let alone give up. Thus far into my change-making career, I have not figured out why we have such unrealistic expectations. However, I am in awe every day of how many of us nonetheless meet them. 

Your lived experience will differ from mine, but it may at times lead you to feel similarly throughout your journey. I have chosen to share my experiences and the lessons I have drawn to combat the sense of isolation when, despite your best intentions, life serves you a sucker punch and to present you with some options where there may otherwise seem to be no way forward. 

I wrote this book to make a little smoother the impossible that you make real every day.  I wrote this book so that more of your transformational ideas come to life and scale to change the world for the better. 

To fulfill its purpose, this book is a lot. My hope is to leave few if any stones unturned in respect to what a change-maker may experience along their vital journey. 

Some of you would prefer not to know what is in this book. Why? Because it may make you second-guess yourself, and you would rather discover it all along the journey. It may also be your approach to new jobs, restaurants, and travel destinations. You may think that thorough planning takes the thrill out of new experiences. Fair enough. I respect your gumption and, at this point of cumulative bumps and bruises, maybe even envy it a little bit. However, I would still challenge you to skim this book if only to make sure that nothing stupid retains the power to bring you down. Because the world needs you. 

While this book would be helpful to any change-maker, it is particularly useful to change-makers without millions of stagnant dollars to spend on an idea. Even if you do have enough money to spare you from having to get good at all of it, this book may still show you where your fortune would be best spent. 

That said, you are within your rights to want more than impact. I by no means advocate that change-making is in opposition to generating income or long-term wealth, career advancement, social bonds, individual contentment, or even fame. All those ends are both feasible and legitimate. However, this book’s exclusive focus is on helping you make the change that is in you to make. This once – a concession from the perfectionist control freak my family thinks I am – I must let other books address the rest.

As we strive to further accelerate the global transition to a brighter future we must equip, support, and recognize change-makers. After all, change-makers are the vehicles that are going to get us there! Through this book, I hope to make a start by sharing what I have learned over nearly two decades of research and practice in change: how we orchestrate and sustain it across projects, organizations, industries, and society. 

I wrote this book because I have learned the most from those who led with their hearts on their sleeves, stepping into the undesirable consequences of their choices, and fueling their followers with seemingly unwavering conviction. 

I wrote this book because by focusing on the task in front of me year after year, I became – for thousands of people – the only person they knew who had dedicated two decades to nothing but transformation. 

I wrote this book to tell you how it has been for me in case it is ever that way for you. It has not always been pretty, or rewarding, or even worth it. But I know that when any of us set out to do anything worthwhile, we will feel some if not all of this. And I am fed up with the narrative that makes us doubt and retreat when we do. Like trees that shed what has been to endure through winter, change-making is a perennial thing. I will fight for your right to resource, regroup, and relaunch if it is the last thing I do because change-makers like you are our world’s most precious resources and its best chance at a future where all can thrive in harmony with the planet.