Ways of the Relay-Racers: Essays on leaders, misleaders, and the culture-strong organization

If you are a leader you are a culture-creator, for some kind of culture--a strong or shaky one, an inspiring or discouraging one, a vivid or fuzzy one, a healthy or toxic one--will be created and perpetuated on your watch. The only question is whether you will be an accidental or intentional culture-creator, and what kind of culture "soil" you will set out to create.

In Ways of the Relay-Racers, Brian J. Lewis explores what it means to develop a "way" that is passed forward by a team of relay-racers. What does it mean to identify "urgencies" for an organization--to be a time-teller and time-keeper? Since even successful leaders can become misleaders, how do you build a culture-strong organization that avoids the traps of the absent leader, the idealized leader, the misleader, or the leader who operates from a leadership island? What does it mean to operate with moral imagination, and lead in the area of everyday ethics? And should an organization be damaged or laid low by the fire of leadership dysfunction (a not uncommon occurrence), how do you rebuild and reimagine?

We are shaped by the questions we pose (and by how we answer them). Ways of the Relay-Racers is an inquiry into the culture-strong organization.