LEAP UPDATES
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. 
--Peter Drucker
Each month, we publish a Leap of Reason Update to share insights, tools, and learning opportunities for those who are working to raise their performance.
The Hardest Leadership Decisions You’ve Ever Faced
This month, we’ll get right to practical advice for social-sector leaders trying to captain ships through the dark, stormy seas of this pandemic. We’re by no means leadership experts. But Mario is a longtime student of crisis leadership and has been forced to navigate—as a CEO, director, advisor, investor, and donor—through many different periods of turmoil. Sometimes he was successful. Sometimes he screwed up. Here’s what he learned from both.
Brutal Truth & Credible Hope
The wonderful Cheryl Collins told us, with the firm but loving tone she used in her schoolteacher days, that we must use this platform to share both brutal honesty and credible hope. So that’s what we’re going to try to do.
Empathy is Infectuous
Let’s be clear: The Coronavirus pandemic is deadly serious, and we all need to observe the CDC’s latest guidelines for keeping ourselves and others safe. There’s good reason that Lowell’s home state (WA) and Mario’s (OH) are on virtual lockdown, and we have great respect for Governors Jay Inslee (D) and Mike DeWine (R) for making these calls. These two elected officials are demonstrating precisely what courageous, adaptive leadership looks like!
‘Men Are Coming to Kill You’
When we talk about organization building, we know some people think we sound like one of those podcasts designed to put you to sleep. But this past week Lowell got an epic lesson in how organization building can have life-and-death importance for millions of people.
Elegy Economics
Well before the tsunami election of 2016, we were reading, writing, and speaking about the seismic shifts rocking and rending American society—from the technologies that are fundamentally altering the nature of work to the wealth and income inequality that is cleaving us into factions with completely different financial prospects. But neither of us are economists. And we’re sure as hell not Nobel Prize winners. That’s why we were eager to read Good Economics for Hard Times, the new book by…