FOREWORD

This remarkable new book comes at a most opportune time, an evolutionary juncture in which reinventing the possibilities of leadership can play a major positive role in all our lives. Shakti Leadership, based on extensive research, artfully summarizes the best of perennial wisdom, while adding powerful, real-world practices to the repertoire of leaders everywhere.

At its core, Shakti is the creative force from which all structures arise. Nilima and Raj unfold its aspects in an accessible and easily assimilated style. They guide you through powerful processes for integrating the best of Shakti Leadership into your life and organization now, such as finding presence in the midst of frenetic activity and replacing competition with partnership and dynamic balance. The book embraces the most urgent and current questions that most interest both women and men.

We particularly appreciate the interactive components of the book, which engage all aspects of being and doing to integrate the book’s wisdom, chapter by chapter. With an enchanting melody of invitation and possibility, Raj and Nilima intuitively rebut the caveats and skepticism that conscious exploration can stir up. The central message really resounds throughout the book: “It’s time for us to be bolder.” At the heart of Shakti Leadership’s message is the liberation of the creative energy curtailed by thousands of years of fearing women’s power, by both men and women. You are guided through inner, relational, and structural reinvention activities that both challenge and expand your creativity and your ability to step into the unknown with confidence.

Shakti Leadership is written for those willing to step out of hierarchy and into new rhythms of collaboration and invention, moving together rather than against, and welcoming intuition into the boardroom and harmony into our hearts. You experience a new understanding of presence that becomes central to unfolding a different future, and a world in which each person’s creative power can flow through an integral and vital structure. In Shakti Leadership you’ll find a series of lively dialogues that dance between logic and feeling, logos and mythos, and other dynamics that have intrigued consciousness enthusiasts for centuries. This is a book that brings many rich traditions together so that you can expand your leadership skills in core ways that will make a difference now and into the future.

Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks

The Hendricks Institute

December 2015