Stewardship, 2nd Edition

Principles for the Practice

Think of yourself as a social architect engaged in the redesign of a governance system. Stewardship is a set of design principles, a template from which a whole range of management practices can be molded. These principles need to be integrated and customized for your world before the practices will be truly useful. Jumping too quickly to specific practices, and where they are working, is a shortcut that yields disappointing results. Copying others’ best practices is mimicry, not learning and discovery. Benchmarking what others do well is useful for raising our aspirations and setting a higher standard, but this process can become a compliant and dependent form of learning.

Creating our own practices is the basis of ...