Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change - Hardcover

Abrams, Stacey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250191297 ISBN 13: 9781250191298

Verlag: Henry Holt & Co, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Minority Leader is a necessary guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider by Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent black female politicians in the U.S.

Leadership is hard. Convincing others—and often yourself—that you possess the answers and are capable of world-affecting change requires confidence, insight, and sheer bravado. Stacey Abrams's Minority Leader is the handbook for outsiders, written with the awareness of the experiences and challenges that hinder anyone who exists beyond the structure of traditional white male power—women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make a difference.

In Minority Leader, Stacey Abrams argues that knowing your own passion is the key to success, regardless of the scale or target. From launching a company, to starting a day care center for homeless teen moms, to running a successful political campaign, finding what you want to fight for is as critical as knowing how to turn thought into action. Stacey uses her experience and hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, while offering personal stories that illuminate practical strategies.

Stacey includes exercises to help you hone your skills and realize your aspirations. She discusses candidly what she has learned over the course of her impressive career: that differences in race, gender, and class are surmountable. With direction and dedication, being in the minority actually provides unique and vital strength, which we can employ to rise to the top and make real change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stacey Abrams is an author, serial entrepreneur, nonprofit CEO and political leader. After eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Minority Leader, Abrams became the 2018 Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, where she won more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. She has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at both the state and national levels; and she is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Abrams is the 2012 recipient of the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award and the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States.

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Minority Leader

How to Lead From the Outside and Make Real Change

By Stacey Abrams

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2018 Stacey Abrams
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-19129-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Epigraph, 
Introduction, 
One Dare to Want More, 
Two Fear and Otherness, 
Three Hacking and Owning Opportunity, 
Four The Myth of Mentors, 
Five Money Matters, 
Six Prepare to Win and Embrace the Fail, 
Seven Making What You Have Work, 
Eight Work-Life Jenga, 
Nine Taking Power, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

DARE TO WANT MORE

I sit in the living room, a cozy space, warm in the early summer. I am perched on the edge of the sofa next to Valerie, the home's owner, a lovely black woman in her late forties. Across from us, seated close together on a wide settee meant for one, are her two children, a son and a daughter.

Politicians rarely visit their streets, which are nestled in a poorer community in south Georgia. Valerie beams with pride that both her children are headed to college in the fall. David, seventeen, plans to study criminology. Maya, eighteen, her belly round with her first child, intends to become a middle school teacher. Both newly graduated from high school, Maya will give birth in mere weeks and begin college months later, an unwed teen mother. Her intended school is more than three hours north of her home, so her mother will raise her newborn baby while she starts her freshman year.

Valerie speaks matter-of-factly about the coming challenge: raising a new child just as hers leave the nest. Still, she is determined that both her children pursue degrees she never received. Maya, the mother-to-be, wonders aloud how she'll do so far away from home and her baby. Yet in the next breath, she explains how college will be best for her and her child. Their future success rests upon her.

I've come to their home as part of my campaign for governor, so I ask Valerie what she expects of someone like me. What can I do to help make lives like hers better? In her soft voice, she replies she just wants better options for financial aid for her children. They will succeed, she says, if they can afford to stay in school.

As I look around the modest home, passed down through generations, I understand both the pride and the desperation tangled in her response. She got them through and has given them the tools to carve out better lives for themselves. We chat more about the worries she's lived with all those years, our discussion turning to the crime and poverty in their community.

Then I ask Valerie what she wants. At first, all I get in response is a quizzical look that suggests I need to reconsider my bid for higher office. I repeat, "What do you want? For you? What secret dream do you have for yourself?" Her confused expression turns to one of surprise. "I don't know," she tells me. "I've been a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly for twenty years."

"You must want something," I probe, "something you'd like to do for you."

"A day care," she admits quietly. "I'd like to start a day care for unwed mothers, like my daughter. So more girls can finish school and pursue their dreams." But that ambition is beyond her — her body language, her tone of voice, her averted gaze speak louder than her words. I press her, but she demurs with a smile. "Let's just see what happens if you win the governor's job."

Valerie's house in south Georgia is not too different from the squat redbrick house where I grew up on South Street in Gulfport, Mississippi. An oak tree grew in our front yard, shadowing the front sidewalk, forbidding grass to grow beneath its shade. Pink azaleas bloomed each spring from bushes that flanked the front door. Our rented house, and the others set close by, teemed with children — all black, all working-class. We played in our postage-stamp yards, make-believing the fantastical. Superhero exploits. Cops and robbers. As we got older, we'd talk about moving to New Orleans or living in one of the mansions along the beachfront that lay less than five miles away, across the railroad tracks that ran in between our neighborhood and the wealthier environs. We dreamed of more, while our parents' lives centered around survival and making it from paycheck to paycheck. Instinctively, we understood that more had to be possible, even if we didn't know what to do to get there. These imaginings — these desires — are the root of ambition.

As adults, like Valerie, we tend to edit our desires until they fit our construction of who we're supposed to become. In such a world, I wouldn't dare dream of running for higher office, for mayor or governor or president. At least for now, Valerie sees herself retiring in twenty more years from the Piggly Wiggly as a cashier, rather than as a small business owner who helps a community raise its children. From our brief meeting, I could see she had the fire, albeit at a low burn, of a minority leader. She had ambition. She had a vision. But she didn't have the faith. And understandably so.

Whether we come from working-class neighborhoods or grow up comfortably middleclass, minorities rarely come of age explicitly thinking about what we want and how to get it. People already in power almost never have to think about whether they belong in the room, much less if they would be listened to once inside. These men — and they are usually men and typically white — do not have to grapple with low expectations based on gender or race or class. Ambition for them begins with reminiscences of old times and older friendships or newer alliances. The ends have already been decided, with only the means to be discussed.

* * *

Most potential minority leaders feel the same lack of faith Valerie had, at least at some point in their evolution. We may not know how to get the first job, let alone make it to the big chair. We don't know how to take the leap from accepting our fates to actually changing them, and not just a little, but radically. Then there are those who simply do not know what they want. The drive to achieve burns inside, often without a clear target.

We want to "be something," but what that is remains hazy. Often, we cannot articulate our goals because they lie just beyond the reach of who we are supposed to be. Ambition's scale is irrelevant. What holds us back is not scope. It's fear.

And because we don't know what to call our dreams, don't know how to make them happen, or are pretty sure we'll be disappointed, we just stand still. But becoming a minority leader demands that we embrace ambition as our due.

In every sector where I've worked, I am driven by my ambition to encourage others to find their own dreams and exploit their potential. Whether I'm mentoring young people in organizations or speaking with those looking to forge new careers at midlife to explore their potential, the starting block is knowing what you want — and then wanting more. Run for office, take the helm at corporate boards, go back to college, or start a small business. Whatever the path, this book is designed to help locate our ambition and use it to create a path to leadership that does not bow to inner doubts or outside prejudices.

GETTING LOST IN POSSIBILITIES

During law school, one of my tax professors, Anne Alstott, hired me as a research assistant for a book she was coauthoring. As I combed through the reams of documents, I struggled...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Co
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250191297
• ISBN 13: 9781250191298
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien