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All Rights Reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations is permitted. Permission will be granted upon request. The author guarantees all contents are original and do not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work.

Having worked alongside Harvey in the past, I found his book to be not only a reflection of his leadership style; authentic, transparent and values based, but a powerful lens into the application and impact of true leadership. I applaud Harvey for being comfortable being uncomfortable!

Harvey’s quest for meaning creates a touching, inspiring, and humbling masterpiece. Choosing to Lead is not just another book about leadership. It is a thoughtful and useful reflection on the power of curiosity, unconventional thinking, teamwork and the value of inspiring others. A must read!

I was inspired by Harvey Kanter’s book, Choosing to Lead, because it represents an honest, insightful and transparent reflection of a thoughtful leader’s personal journey. Harvey reminds us that the most influential leaders create meaningful and sustainable impact on the lives they touch as well as the businesses they empower. This, in turn, can create a wonderful cascading effect throughout companies and careers.

In Choosing to Lead , Harvey emphasizes that humble leaders create and drive a culture around a desire to learn and explore. This inspires others to push, to take risks, to step up, and to step out. This book offers sound and practical advice for leading organizations. It is a smart reading for any executive who aspires to be a great leader.

Choosing to Lead is a quintessential leadership book—significantly impactful! The read of Harvey’s journey is a must, the lessons learned and his real-life examples are applicable, practical, and relevant to any person who wants to lead successfully, execute wisely, and strategize innovatively.

Harvey Kanter’s career provides a treasure trove of easily relatable yet highly impactful leadership lessons. He has “been there and done that” and brilliantly illustrates many real-world examples as actionable lessons whereby every reader can extract real impact.

Choosing to Lead is such a powerful reminder of quiet confidence and how it can be portrayed in inspiring ways. In all my 40 years in retail and being exposed to many leaders, never once did arrogance motivate me. Quiet confidence, on the other hand, seen through remarkable leadership for and about the team stood above all else in creating a culture. That quiet confidence was like a magnet ever pulling the team forward.

T he phrase, “the art and practice of leadership” has long been in use. Only in recent years have we begun to take in what it means. Our notions of leadership, our deep and powerful myths about what it means to lead, our default settings when we think about what leading an organization, community, or nation requires, have been rooted in images of lone heroes in command, leading the charge.

These great myths are now under review. We find ourselves asked to live at one of those great hinge points in history, a time of profound disruption and change, spawning unprecedented challenges—environmental, technological, social-economic-political, moral, spiritual. Our cultural assumptions are being upended in the face of environmental consciousness, globalization, and the intensification of complexity, and it is in this context that we are undergoing a reconsideration of what we mean by “leadership.” Lone heroes are having a harder time winning the day. In today’s world, there is a hunger and a call for “adaptive-creative leadership” that can help organizations move from familiar patterns that are no longer fitting, through the rapids of change, to create new patterns more fitting to what is now required. The key word is “create.”

To create is to bring into form what has not existed before. We have regarded “creativity” as something “artists”—the creative types—do, and we have recognized that art and artistry require imagination. But in the rough and tumble of the business sector, “creativity” has typically been consigned to the margins, presuming that the “real work” of leadership primarily requires the capacity to wield power, make tough decisions, and act decisively. Leadership does, indeed, require the capacity to navigate the currents of power, to make significant decisions, and to act with confidence. But in this hinge time, we are discovering that we have a great deal to learn about additional and essential qualities of leadership from those we conventionally recognize as artists.

Artists know that creativity requires wading into and staying with what feels conflicted, out of whack, dissonant, and sometimes overwhelming—moving into rather than denying or merely “fixing” the challenge at hand. Artists know also that the process sometimes requires pausing, waiting, listening, observing, taking time for the mud to settle. Artists know how to stay centered on the edge where the familiar patterns can give way to emerging possibilities. And artists learn how to shed what is no longer viable as they prototype—that is, run experiments—knowing that both the successes and the failures will cast light leading to the best outcome. And like any great potter, artist-leaders in today’s world know that they must bring their best work to the test of the fire—whether it be the fire of the board room or the C-suite, the press or the labor union, the shareholders or the neighborhood.

Great leaders in today’s world also submit their endeavors to the test of their conscience and the life of the commons. They seek to align their work with their own moral compass, while working the question of what will optimally serve the common good. Knowing that everything is connected to everything else, their field of action and deepest purposes both include and transcend the bottom line of their own organization.

The artistry of leadership today is less like that of a painter alone in the attic and much more like the conductor of an orchestra, the director in the theatre, or the jazz pianist. Each continually works with an ensemble of others and hands off essential features of the creative, building process—to colleagues, engineers, accountants, the sales force, human resource managers, suppliers, department heads—inspiring each of them to bring their own artistry to the work. Indeed, a fact at the core of adaptive-creative leadership is that you don’t even think of doing it alone —no one can move a complex system by themselves.

Like all artistry, learning adaptive-creative leadership requires honing a set of skills, becoming competent in the craft, repeatedly risking failure, learning a discipline of soul—allowing one’s self to be changed over time. This kind of learning and becoming requires practice, practice, practice. As one watercolor painter has put it, “It requires many miles on the brush.”

Great painters are steeped in learning from continuous practice—and they don’t just hang out alone in the attic. They learn, in part, by looking over the shoulder of other painters—in the studio, at the edge of a landscape, or in a gallery or museum. They study and watch each other practice. Then they return to their own practice and reach beyond where others have gone—gifting us with their distinctive contribution.

Harvey Kanter is generously inviting us to observe his more than forty years of practice—to look over his shoulder and through his mind, heart, and hand. In this book, Choosing to Lead, Kanter reveals his own journey in the adventure of learning the artistry of leadership as a businessman and as a citizen of the commons. He offers a compelling example of how curiosity, tenacity, teamwork and shared accomplishment, dialogue, values, decisiveness, and optimism in the face of setbacks play in the alchemy of effective leadership. In this time of both peril and promise when we hunger for masterful leadership, he provides a lens through which we each can gain vital and meaningful insight into “the art and practice of leadership.”