Serializations

Preface

Progress requires a willingness to open ourselves to new ideas, as well as the courage to let go of old concepts that used to serve us well. It demands that we question the status quo.

I was perfectly comfortable with my status quo when I boarded a flight to Germany several years ago. I had packed two books by the philosopher Martin Buber, who had long been an intellectual hero of mine. His ideas had been among the key inspirations for my work with leaders and organizations around the world over the prior decades, and I was excited for the uninterrupted time to read and study him again.

I started into the first of the books just after takeoff. Somewhere over the Atlantic, however, a passage he wrote stopped me short. I put the book down and closed my eyes. I had to find my bearings. What I had just read suggested that much of what I thought I knew about Buber and his work was mistaken. I had read him too thinly, too naively, too quickly. He was making a far deeper and more fundamental point than I had ever before understood, with a host of astonishing implications.

This wasn’t a small matter, because it meant that I may have unwittingly spread a misunderstanding to tens of thousands of people in speeches and workshops I had delivered, not to mention the millions of people who had read earlier books I had written. What I had shared both in person and in writing all those years wasn’t inherently wrong, and in many situations was still immensely helpful, both to others and myself. But it was also incomplete in ways that I didn’t begin to realize until that eureka moment on the plane.

At the time, I had recently retired from the Arbinger Institute, a leadership training and consulting firm I led for over two decades. I ended up at Arbinger through a combination of fate and chance. I had graduated from Yale Law School and was practicing law at one of the country’s mega-firms when I crossed paths with a philosophy professor with whom I had studied during my undergraduate years. I revered him and his work, and within a year that reconnection caused me to leave the practice of law and join him and a few others in the project of bringing his then new and fascinating body of work to the world.

Over the years at Arbinger, I threw myself into the study of interhuman connection, which is when I first encountered Buber’s work. I started boiling down very complex but important ideas into concepts, diagrams, and other digestible forms that would lend themselves to easy practical application. During these developmental times, I also wrote the original versions of Arbinger’s bestselling books, Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace. These books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold many millions of copies. Their success has put me in boardrooms and on convention stages all around the world. But on that flight to Germany, I realized that, for decades, despite the best of intentions, I had been blocked from helping people more powerfully because there was something fundamental, right under my nose, that I had been missing.

So began, for me, a new and far deeper interdisciplinary exploration into the emerging understanding of the world of relation. When I say relation, I’m not talking about relationships. I’m referring, instead, to our fundamental connectedness—to how the worlds of work and home and leadership, as well as the worlds within ourselves, are constructed by our intersections.

What do I mean by that? Consider the example of this book. As I write these words, I am thinking of you, the reader—imagining who you are, what kinds of words and explanations would be helpful to you, what kinds of challenges or interests have caused you to crack open this book, and what my wish for you in encountering it would be. In that respect, your presence for me is pressing the keyboard as much as my fingers are! I am also driven and influenced by all the conversations I have had with those around me, by the work of other thinkers I have been in conversation with, and by the ways I have learned to look at the world as a result of my experiences with others.

While you might think of me as the lone author of this book, I am not alone. I am writing as the relational intersection of all these influences. And you, as the reader, bring your own intersections with you in how you read it, what you perceive, and what you take from it. So, in encountering this book, you aren’t encountering me, you are encountering we, which includes you as well.

It was a passage about relation that started penetrating the darkness on my flight to Germany. My fundamental mistake had been that, despite all my convictions to the contrary, I had still bought into ideas that could too easily be misunderstood in individualistic, nonrelational ways. Alone, this is not surprising, as the conceptual air we all breathe is still overwhelmingly individualistic in its assumptions, despite the fact that science has completely debunked individualistic theories in favor of relational ones. On that flight, I suddenly saw something with great clarity, something I believe the world will soon come to understand as well: Management of the individual is dead, or soon will be; management of relation is the new leadership paradigm.

In 2021, I founded a new firm, Withiii Leadership, to keep exploring and pushing down this new path of understanding. The ideas in You and We capture what we at Withiii do to help organizations and their people. They are powerful ideas and approaches for bringing people together, whether in companies, neighborhoods, or on the world stage, as they don’t presume the very divides that people are trying to overcome. Rather, they are built on and powered by relation.

I have written You and We in the same style I used when writing Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace—as a story. If you are familiar with those earlier books, you will no doubt recognize my voice. While I draw much inspiration from stories and people I have encountered throughout my life, the characters in You and We are fictional. Having said that, I find myself in every single one of them. My hope is that you will discover parts of yourself in these characters as well—in Zane, Dot, Cree, Eliza, Pam, Ricardo, and the rest. As you do, their wrestling and discoveries will become yours as well, and you will become the most important character in the story.

You and We is a culmination of all I have learned over my years researching, training, advising, mentoring, and working with leaders to transform their organizational ecosystems. In a way, it is a powerful 2.0 to my earlier works—a work that attempts to correct misconceptions and move understanding and application forward in even more dynamic directions. It details not only the best way I have learned to lead and run organizations, but also the best method for stitching the human family together in the face of our many threats.

This book is a journey into the art and science of relation, applied to work, to life, and to leadership. It’s about you and about we, and about how together wins. However, as you will discover, together doesn’t mean what you think it does. And the way we get there may be a path you’ve never before considered.