THE PARTNERSHIP ECONOMY
Powered by purpose
​Fueled by trust
A different kind of leadership is needed in our complex, fast-changing world.
It's nimble, it's about your organization's deeper purpose, and it's about partnering with your people to unleash collective creativity inside and outside your walls.
NIMBLE LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS
Running a nimble organization means that leaders must make one fundamental—and psychologically challenging—shift in what they believe to be their job. Instead of assuming that the people at the top create the best ideas and push them down through the ranks, leaders design innovation systems that unleash the potential for collective co-creation.
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Nimble is about designing organizations with three interlocking leadership roles: entrepreneurial leaders with the freedom to innovate, enabling leaders who coach and connect would-be entrepreneurs to bring new ideas to life, and architecting leaders who create the gameboard of a purpose-driven, human-centric culture, and structures that work together to fuel perpetual creativity. Working in a nimble way doesn't mean accelerating to the point of exhaustion and burnout. It means slowing down to build trust, gain new perspectives, and make better decisions with all your key stakeholders.
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Read more in our Harvard Business Review article Nimble Leadership, selected as one of HBR's Top 10 Must Reads on Leadership in the past ten years. You can sign up for our MIT Executive Education course on Nimble Leadership, or contact me to learn more about implementing Nimble in your organization.
PARTNERSHIPS FOR COMMUNITY PROSPERITY
The other strand of my work is about how companies use their power to lead locally for community prosperity. The best corporate leaders bring humility and a partnership mentality to helping their communities thrive. Partnerships are not extractive or transactive, but contributive and collaborative.
When leaders drive social responsibility down to the local level, they create value for their employees, shareholders, communities, and the planet. I study and advise leaders on how to design company-community innovation partnerships that boost the regional economy, improve the environment, and give Americans their livelihoods back. In a real partnership, everyone wins.
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Read my latest piece on this subject: How Corporate Clout Helps Communities Thrive, or contact me to learn more about how to do this work in your community.
WRITING
ABOUT KATE
Dr. Kate Isaacs is a scholar, teacher, and strategy advisor who designs organizations and stakeholder partnerships that enable people and places to thrive.
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She works with organizations in all sectors as a consultant on strategy and culture change, and as a facilitator of complex stakeholder engagements. Her work is informed by design thinking, system dynamics, principled negotiation, ecological stewardship, and somatic psychology. Kate is a certified Shadow Work coach who emphasizes the positive potential in people and organizations—noticing and expanding what is working, and transforming obstacles and habits that block the natural orientation towards creativity, growth, and health.
WHAT CEOs SAY ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP ECONOMY
"The most effective way to create shareholder value is to serve the interests of all stakeholders...We have to build radically higher levels of trust and transparency with [them]…stakeholders want to be associated with a company that has heart."
Marc Benioff, Founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce