We are moving away from the old idea of leadership - leadership has less to do (now) with heroism. We don't look for... unblemished omnipotent heroes, but leaders who are complex, dependent, changeable... We do not need one dominant authority structure telling all our inner voices to shut up.

We have entered a new and different world-richly interconnected and radically multicentric-in which the traditional holders of power have to move over and make room for new stakeholders, new players, and new leaders of many kinds. Nobody in Charge, drawing on the learnings of a wise and widely experienced public executive, offers some priceless insights into how things have changed, where they are now, and where we may be going next in this bewildering terrain.

The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion...expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew.

I have been putting words like 'abnormal' and 'deviant' in quotes because those categorizations are under fire now, the boundary between normal and abnormal as questionable now as are all the other boundaries that once defined social reality.

We are moving away from the old idea of leadership - leadership has less to do (now) with heroism. We don't look for... unblemished omnipotent heroes, but leaders who are complex, dependent, changeable... We do not need one dominant authority structure telling all our inner voices to shut up.

One challenge of growing up in the twenty-first century will be to acquire a self-definition that can encompass person and planet, socially constructed self and transcendent being, organism and machine.