Acknowledgments
THE FIRST THANK YOU must go to the participant in my Courageous Follower workshop who brought a future guide dog to class and alerted me to the practice of Intelligent Disobedience. Unfortunately, her name is lost among the hundreds of federal employees who have taken Courageous Follower training.
Next, I must thank my good friend Pat McLagan, and her friends from the Woodside Group, Donna and Larry McNamara, for introducing me to Jim Kutsch, president and CEO at The Seeing Eye, Inc. Jim and Dave Johnson, his director of training, gave generously of their time and knowledge in helping me understand how Intelligent Disobedience training is accomplished with their marvelous dogs, which change people’s lives. I also wish to acknowledge Lydia Wade, who for twenty years ran Blue Ridge Assistance Dogs and shared with me her knowledge and love of the service dogs she trained.
Moving on from there, my gratitude goes out to Steve Piersanti, Berrett-Koehler’s Publisher, who recognized the value in this project when I first mentioned it to him around 2010. Life sometimes gets in the way of book projects, so Steve hadn’t heard more from me about the project for two years. Unprompted, he reached out to express his continued interest. I was appreciative of the constancy of his commitment to the topic and delighted that I could tell him the first draft was nearly ready. Steve then served as my editor on this project, twenty years after serving as editor of The Courageous Follower.
My submission of the manuscript then triggered the devoted team at Berrett-Koehler to swing into action. Among them are Jeevan Sivasubramanian, Rick Wilson, Diane Platner, Johanna Vondeling, Kristen Frantz, Mike Crowley, Kat Engh, María Jesús Aguiló, Jonathan Peck, Susan Gall, and their dedicated colleagues.
They in turn harnessed the power of their stable of readers who help BK authors polish their books with skillful feedback from a variety of perspectives. My thanks to Josh O’Conner, Kirsten Sandberg, Maria Lewytzky-Milligan, and Anna Leinberger; Anna did yeoman’s service by reviewing the manuscript a second time to help with the final polish.
To this list, I add my own readers, who generously gave me their time and feedback including Rick Shapiro, Sarah Adams Bell, Leith Chaleff-Freudenthaler, and Eli Hager. The book would have suffered from a number of faults these two groups of readers helped me understand and correct. Rick’s eagle editing eye, in particular, helped me create a map through the book for readers to follow with trust in where the journey was taking them.
Then there are the 160-plus friends and colleagues and BK champions who provided input into giving the book its name. There was never any question in my mind that Intelligence Disobedience would be the title, but they validated that with overwhelming support and helped with the delicate task of finding a subtitle that further conveys the book’s topic and rings well to the ear.
Following these good folks are my artistic friends who loaned their practiced eyes to the cover and book design, most especially Debra Witt, founder of Witt’s End Design and Branding consultancy in Maryland, and Monica Worth, president of her communications agency, Voice, in rural Virginia.
If this is beginning to read like the credits of a film production, it is because that’s what it takes to produce a professionally rendered publication.
The book is replete with stories that make Intelligent Disobedience memorable. The tellers of some of the stories are acknowledged by name, others are lost in the richness of stories I am told orally by folks who approach me during break time or after a presentation: my apologies to the “lost” group. Other friends and colleagues whose valuable stories emerge briefly in the text include Neal Maillet, Richard Scott Adams, Mary Miller, and, of course, Barry Richmond, whom I quote rather extensively.
Every writer also has a few people close to him or her who provide intimate support. Chief among these is my fellow author and friend Alan Briskin, who gave me counsel at a number of junctions before and during the life of the project, which were invaluable. Thank you, Alan. Don’t stop. Similarly, I must thank my fellow author and friend Pat McLagan, who has given me encouragement throughout the process and who has made her home a safe harbor when I am in Washington, DC, and my colleague and friend David Lassiter, who provides another safe harbor in DC, for asking questions that force me to think more deeply about the issues on which I am writing. Added to this group is my former colleague Laurel Davar, who wrote long, thoughtful analyses of how she managed to constructively disobey ill-thought-out orders from a dominating leader of the organization where we toiled together for a number of years.
In the course of my research on Intelligent Disobedience, I became aware of a group of scholars who continue to mine the seminal research of Stanley Milgram. I missed the Obedience to Authority conference they held in Canada in 2014, but one of its co-conveners, Dr. Nestar Russell of Nipissing University in Ontario, referred me to an excellent bibliography on the subject. He also introduced me to another conference on obedience being convened in Kolomna, Russia, by Dr. Alexander Voronov of the State University of Russia for the Humanities in Moscow. I am grateful to “Sasha” for his invitation to present my paper on Intelligent Disobedience to the conference and to several of his colleagues in the field who expressed great interest in the applications of Intelligent Disobedience.
As cited in the book, Marty Krovetz, director of LEAD, an affiliated center of the Coalition of Essential Schools, has been a critical resource for my exploration of obedience in classroom management. Tiffany Sawyer, director of Prevention Services at the Georgia Center for Child Advocacy and Rachel Ballard of Public School Works, pointed me in helpful directions regarding the troubling issues of childhood abuse prevention and the problematic use of seclusion and restraints in schools.
One of my successors at the Followership Community of Learning at the International Leadership Association, Dr. Rob Koonce, did me the great service of introducing me to Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a holocaust survivor and inspirational speaker. Edith, in turn, introduced me to her close associate, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who graciously consented to writing the foreword to this book at her urging. Their colleague, Steven L. Smith, EdD, also gave much appreciated support for this. Both I and the book are enriched by these connections.
Lastly, I wish to express my appreciation to my partner, Ellen Adams, for her understanding of my need for time to write and rewrite. I am delighted she was able to join me at a Berrett-Koehler author’s cooperative retreat and meet some of the many good-hearted and effective souls who share Berrett-Koehler’s aspiration of creating a world that works for all.