Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance

Chapter SixSustainable Success

With Janet Goodall

It is a common defect in men, not to consider in good weather the possibility of a tempest.

—Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1452)

Staying Up

The core of uplifting leadership is sustainability. Unfortunately, sustainability is often an afterthought of organizational change. It is the unread postscript, the parting shot that nobody hears, the ripened fruit that’s already starting to rot before it reaches its market. On the highway of attempted improvement, last-ditch efforts to secure sustainability are often the final truck stop before disappointment and remorse. Sustainability is the thing we think about when all the action has ended, when the good times are over and the money is all but ...