For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership is receiving some international attention. It's a 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Award winner and a finalist in the Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year and University of San Diego Department of Leadership's Outstanding Leadership Book of the Year competitions.
   
For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership is about the ideas that drive the work of the Kansas Leadership Center. The authors, David D. Chrislip and Ed O'Malley, share their belief that 'civic leadership' needs to become more purposeful, provocative and engaging in order to cope with today's civic challenges and to help transform the civic culture of our communities and regions. Chrislip and O'Malley use the real-life leadership dilemmas of five Kansans to bring these ideas to life.



The book's title, For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership, suggests its orientation. Rather than viewing the exercise of leadership in the civic arena as a way of furthering individual desires or acting only when your backyard is threatened, the authors see it as a means of sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good. In the end, limiting one's conception of the meaning of civic responsibility to a reactive or passive role most often allows for a lot of noisy complaining while leaving the responsibility for taking initiative and action to others or to local authorities. A great deal more than complaining is needed from many more of us if progress is to be made on the issues we care about.