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This chapter presents a unique perspective on opportunities that the Covid pandemic has created for the sector. Drawing on extensive, professional experience of working with leaders in the higher education sector, a more holistic perspective is offered in relation to organisational development; transforming university cultures into more inclusive, collaborative and evolutionary environments. Three key leadership skills needed for the post-pandemic world are outlined: presencing, taking courageous actions and transmuting the ego in the service for others. System thinking, leaderful and holistic development models are used to consider the practical implications of leading the new.

We explore how scholarly understandings of and the practice of organizational transformation have evolved since Bartunek and Louis’s (1988) Research in Organizational Change and Development chapter. While Bartunek and Louis hoped to see strategy scholarship and OD approaches to transformation inform each other, strategy literature has drifted away from transformation toward more continuous change. OD practice has focused on the implementation of its own versions of transformation through Large Group Interventions, Appreciative Inquiry, the new dialogic OD, and Theory U. Based on a discussion of Theory U, we call attention to the importance of individuals as an important source of new ideas in understanding and practicing large-scale change.

Preparing forces and their allies to operate in a world where asymmetry appears to be the only logical option for adversaries will require some significant and innovative adaptations to training and education methods. New models in leadership, selection, training, and education of leaders and troops are necessary to cope with complexity, non-predictability in conflict solving, and peace support operations. Multidimensional thinking and acting in military decision-making and applying new learning models to build up a climate of change and innovation on all levels of the armed forces is necessary. Organizational learning models, already applied in reshaping civil enterprises, are also useful in restructuring military forces and prepare them for the new challenges. T. Edmunds argues that the emerging new roles of the military cannot only be derived from an “objective functional reassessment” of the nature of new threats but are emerging, rather, as “a consequence of domestic and international socio-political influences that shape state’ perception of what their Armed Forces should look like and the purposes they should serve.” There is a higher priority for intercultural competences for leaders of all levels of responsibility, especially regarding the operational regions of the future and the globalized outcomes of conflicts in general. Research in this domain shows that methods of “face work” are best accomplished by Ting-Toomey's “identity negotiation.” Reshaping, restructuring, and preparing for new core rolls of the military and civil task forces are only to master when the responsible leaders manage to overcome the so-called “blind spot in leadership theories” (C.O. Scharmer), so leadership seems to be more and more a collective method of finding the “self.”

The purpose of this case study was to explore senior librarians’ perceptions of successful leadership skills in the 21st century. The data gathered from 10 senior library leaders consisted of demographic information and responses to six open-ended interview questions. From the NVivo 10 analysis, several significant themes emerged regarding successful library leadership skills in the 21st century at two levels: foundational and interpersonal. At the foundational level, technical and knowledge skills form the building blocks for the next level of interpersonal skills. Persuasion and collaborative skills are interwoven with these interpersonal skills, both of which are at the core of the postindustrial paradigm of leadership. These two levels of skills, with an emphasis on persuasion skills, should form the basis of succession planning programs for next generation librarians. Implementing such programs could lead to increased leadership diversity, greater job satisfaction, improved job performance and effectiveness, all of which help retain librarians and ease staff shortages. Further studies are recommended.

Global collaboration, or the ability to collaborate with people different from ourselves or even across species, becomes increasingly important in our interconnected world to engage constructively with and across difference. As we face more complex challenges, both locally and globally, the need for the creativity and innovation made possible by diverse perspectives is only amplified. Through five stories from our work as consultants and practitioners helping organizations to collaborate, we explore the role of global leadership in collaboration during times of crisis in various sectors. We began by asking ourselves a series of questions about global collaboration that could also serve as future research directions for scholars. We argue that new forms of leadership are required in the global context where both tasks and relationship domains are characterized by high complexity. We conclude by providing insights and recommendations for global leaders to address those complexities through collaboration and help their organizations learn from their experiences in crises and beyond.

The present chapter explores the topic of death in the context of contemporary New Delhi, India. Building upon what I chose to call an ‘expanded ethnography’, it explores the multiple ways in which sensory, visual and digital mediations and tools can help researchers address such an existentially delicate topic. Building on a mix of online visual ethnography (of computer screens and smartphones), of bodily/sensory practices, of sound recording and image-making, my research focussed on retirement homes and shelters amidst a bulging Indian metropolis. I engaged with subjects who, because of personal choices or family difficulties, have ended up finishing their lives in solitude amidst a city forced to co-live with the presence of death. Alternating between photographic portraits, filmic observations and moments of playful exchanges in front of a camera (with me as one of the objects portrayed) my method capitalizes upon the integration (and problematisation) of bodily (sensory and affective) as well as digital techniques. All together these different mediations have granted me access to different layers of connection to the topic of death in Delhi and also to my ageing guides/interlocutors.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).