Reos Partners

  • ☰ Menu
  • People
  • Our Work
  • Methods
  • Publications
  • Blog
  • Contact
Adam Kahane

Press

How To Balance Power and Love: A Strategy and Business Interview with Adam Kahane


March 9, 2011

Other Blog Posts
How To Step Into Radical CollaborationShaping the Future Using Transformative Scenarios | Course in April 2023Reos Partners Announces Mahmood Sonday as Managing DirectorReos Partners, Climate Champions Team, and TED Countdown Launch the Radical Climate Collaboration InitiativeAddressing Climate Change in Australia Using Transformative ScenariosEmpire Building Playbook: Strategies for Building DecarbonizationTransformative Scenarios to Reshape the State of Rio de Janeiro’s FutureDeveloping the Empire Building PlaybookView other Blog Posts »

Social change expert Adam Kahane suggests that to master complex challenges, leaders need to learn to act and empathize simultaneously.

Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Power without love,” said King, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

This is a concept that business leaders need to understand, because in times of crisis (and afterward), the people of an enterprise are put under a great deal of stress. Many people in major corporations today are still wondering if they will lose their jobs. A system that follows only the impulses of compassion and solidarity (which Kahane calls love) will lose its competitiveness; a system that follows only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness (which he calls power) will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and this stance may, in the end, be the single most important factor in enabling a leader to accomplish great things.

Read the whole article here.

Authors

  • Art Kleiner

Our Work

  • Impact Report
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Video
  • Brochure
  • Reos Review

Our Organisation

  • Locations
  • People
  • Methods

Learn More

  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Careers
  • Archive
  • Privacy and Data Protection Policy
  • VERIFIED Seal

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Search

Sign Up for our Newsletter

here!