Afterword: The Living
Legacy of Robert K. Greenleaf

Larry C. Spears

President & CEO

The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership

I.APERSONAL REMEMBRANCE OF ROBERTK.GREENLEAF

On September 20th, 1990 I had my one-and-only encounter with Bob Greenleaf, which occurred just nine days before his death. I had been appointed as the new director of The Greenleaf Center in February of 1990. Several planned trips were scheduled and postponed throughout the spring and summer, due to Bob’s strokes and related health matters.

At that time, the future of servant leadership, and of The Greenleaf Center, seemed not nearly as strong as it is today. Awareness of Green-leaf’s writings was still mostly word-of-mouth, and there were a few people who had voiced doubts to me as to the likelihood of The Greenleaf Center continuing after his passing. I was also aware of Bob Greenleaf’s own concerns as to his legacy, and so as I planned for what turned out to 322be our one-and-only morning together, I sought to share with him my vision and insights into what I believed was a brighter future still to come for the organization that carried his name. I felt in my bones that servant leadership was about to blossom all over the world as a result of the many seeds that he and others had sown in the preceding 20 years, and I shared my ideas with him as to how I thought The Greenleaf Center could be of greater help in nurturing those seeds and many more in the future.

In addition to trying to reassure him about the future legacy of his work and his writings, I had also brought dozens of letters that I had received from people who had shared with me just how great an influence servant leadership and Bob’s writings had been to them. With those twin hopes in mind to reassure Bob as to his future legacy and to remind him of the positive difference that he had already had in the world, I drove out from Indianapolis to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania and to the Crosslands Retirement Center.

Immediately prior to visiting with Bob, I spent a half hour talking with Lisa Sweeney, the social worker who frequently read to him. She told me a bit about his recent life there; how his weakening physical condition and multiple strokes had caused him great frustration and had seriously limited his ability to speak; how he loved listening to classical music; and a bit about his personality traits. Ms. Sweeney mentioned that he was one of the most unassuming people she had ever met, and she recounted a story that seemed illustrative of his extremely modest nature: Bob Green-leaf had supposedly once been asked by a new resident at Crosslands what kind of work he had done in the past. Greenleaf, a man of remarkable accomplishments and an active professional life that lasted sixty years, had simply responded by saying, “I worked in an office.”

Walking into Bob’s room, I found him sitting in his wheelchair and facing the window. He turned his head and smiled, and said “hello.” I sat down in a nearby chair and introduced myself. As I did, I noticed on his sunny windowsill several pictures, including a picture of my two sons, James and Matthew, which I had sent to him along with a birth announcement about Matthew’s arrival into the world two months earlier. Matthew Spears had been born on the same date as Bob’s own birthday—July 14th (Bastille Day!). I picked up the picture and turned it toward him. He smiled at me and slowly said, “nice children.”

Robert Greenleaf had been concerned in past years about the continuation of both the servant-leader concept and the Greenleaf Center. In a letter from the mid-1980s he wrote, “My major concern for the 323Greenleaf Center is for its future. I may be hanging up my sword any day now, and I would like to feel the work I have done to encourage building greater integrity into our many institutions will be continued and enlarged in new directions.” It was important for me to share some of the positive things that had occurred at the Greenleaf Center since arriving a few months earlier—and to convey my own sense of the ongoing revitalization of the Robert K. Greenleaf Center.

Bob had not seen the Center’s new office in Indianapolis; however, we visually walked around it through a series of black-and-white photographs that I had taken for this purpose. I described the area and building where we were located at that time, and I showed him the half-dozen literature cabinets filled with hundreds of copies of his books, essays, and videotapes. Bob was clearly moved by this visualization of our office, and he stared for a long time at a photo of a lithograph (“Terms of Light”) created by his wife, Esther, which still hangs on a wall in my office.

Greenleaf tenderly examined photocopies of a series of ten display advertisements that I had recently put together, and which had been placed in various magazines. As Bob heard about the significance of this project—and particularly when he was told that his ideas and writings would be reaching a new audience of over a half-million readers through the advertisements in these publications—he chuckled and said, “good work.” I then read to Bob some heartfelt and laudatory letters and messages that I had received from a dozen different people, including: Jude Dougherty, Dean of The Catholic University in America, Washington, D.C.; Tom Kessinger, President of Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania.; Ed Ouellette, Bob’s life-long friend from Evansville, Indiana, who had named his son Robert Greenleaf Ouellette; Ladislas Rice, a British businessman in London, England; Harold Miller, management consultant and another longtime friend of Bob from Winnetka, Illinois; Richard Hunt, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and others. As I finished reading these letters and good wishes, a look of amazement swept across his face. Bob seemed profoundly touched by hearing these expressions of appreciation from others who had, in turn, been touched by him and his writings. As Quakers, both Bob and I found great meaning in silence together, and so we sat quietly together for some time before he whispered, “I don’t know what to say.”

There was, of course, nothing that he needed to say. It was I who had come to do the saying on behalf of many of us—to remind him of the rich 324legacy that he has left each of us—and to simply thank him for his life’s work. I told him of my own appreciation of the opportunity to serve as the Greenleaf Center’s own servant-leader. Bob listened as I also told him of the hundreds of people whom I had already met by that time who had been profoundly influenced by his writings on the servant-leader concept. I said to him that I believed that his ideas were likely to become increasingly influential in the coming years. He stared intently for a few moments, and then gave a relaxing sigh.

Our single meeting on that sunny Thursday morning in September was of great importance to me, personally. Bob’s son, Newcomb, has suggested that it may also have been of considerable importance to Bob as well, providing him with a reminder of his positive legacy to the world, and of the many lives that he touched for the better during his 86 years— as well as communicating the increasing vibrancy of the organization which bears his name, and which he had founded twenty-six years earlier as the Center for Applied Ethics. Newcomb Greenleaf has said that he believes that following that meeting his father was at last able to let go of any remaining concerns that he may have had, and assume a greater sense of peacefulness. I like to think that was the case, and I know that for me, our single encounter just days before his death provided me with a palpable sense of inspiration and purpose that has guided my own work ever since.

I stood up and took Bob’s hand in mine, and thanked him for our time together. He smiled and said, “Thank you, Larry.” As I walked out of his room in Crossland’s Firbank East Wing I turned around for one final look. Bob had picked up the Greenleaf Center’s latest newsletter and was slowly turning the page.

II. WHYSERVANT LEADERSHIPMATTERS

Since Bob Greenleaf’s death, we have witnessed an unparalleled explosion of interest and practice of servant leadership. In many ways it can be 325said that the times are only now beginning to catch up with Robert Green-leaf’s visionary call to servant leadership. Greenleaf’s thinking transcended the old arena of leadership techniques and helped to move our thinking toward the deepening wisdom of servant-based leadership. This emerging model is based on trust, teamwork and community; it seeks to involve others in decision making; it is strongly based in ethical and caring behavior, and attempts to enhance the personal growth of workers while improving the caring and quality of our many institutions.

It is important to stress that servant leadership is not a “quick-fix” approach. Nor is it something that can be quickly instilled within an institution. At its core, servant leadership is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work—in essence, a way of being—that has the potential for creating positive change throughout our society.

CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP

1. SERVANT LEADERSHIPAND ORGANIZATIONS

Servant leadership crosses all boundaries. Today it is being applied by people working within a wide variety of organizations: for-profit businesses, not-for-profit corporations, churches, universities, health care organizations, and foundations. Each institution adapts Greenleaf’s ideas to not only fit their own culture but help transform it. Nothing could have made Robert Greenleaf happier than to see the ongoing evolution of his ideas since 1990.

• An increasing number of for-profit companies have adopted servant leadership as part of their corporate philosophy or as a foundation for their mission statement. Among these are The Toro Company (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Synovus Financial Corporation (Columbus, Georgia), ServiceMaster Company (Downers Grove, Illinois), The Men’s Wearhouse (Fremont, California), Southwest Airlines (Dallas, Texas), and TDIndustries (Dallas, Texas), to name but a few. These and other institutions are also busy developing the skills and capacities in their employees which Greenleaf advocated: listening, consensus decision making, persuasion, lifelong learning, participatory research, exposure to ideas from the humanities, shared power, and full accountability. It turns out these are some of the same capacities required for related management and leadership approaches such as continuous quality improvement and systems thinking. In an age marked by conspicuous corporate scandals, servant leadership offers the refreshing 326notion that profit, important as it may be, is not the only purpose of a business; it also exists to create a positive impact on its employees and community.
• Religious leaders from the full spectrum of traditions have recognized that the ideas of servant leadership resonate with the history and mission of their faith. Christian churches are using servant leadership as a way to give fresh meaning to parish and congregational missions, to engage in church renewal, and to develop members as servants in the wider community. Several independent organizations rooted in Christian values are applying servant leadership to the journey of faith. Chief among these are: The Servant Leadership School (Washington, D.C.), The Institute for Servant Leadership (Asheville, North Carolina), and The Center for Faithwalk Leadership (Augusta, Georgia). None of this is surprising. Catholic sisters were the first to respond to Greenleaf’s essay The Servant as Leader when it was published in 1970. But servant leadership also applies to other faith traditions. Newcomb Greenleaf, for example, teaches workshops on the connections between servant leadership and Buddhist thought. And both Jewish and Islamic practitioners of servant leadership have commented to me over the years that they have found Greenleaf’s writings and their own faith literature to be mutually reinforcing.
• Servant leadership has influenced many noted writers, thinkers, and leaders. Max DePree, former chairman of the Herman Miller Company and author of Leadership Is an Art and Leadership Jazz has said, “The servanthood of leadership needs to be felt, understood, believed, and practiced.” And Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, has said that he tells people “not to bother reading any other book about leadership until you first read Robert Greenleaf’s book, Servant Leadership. I believe it is the most singular and useful statement on leadership I’ve come across.” In recent years, a growing number of leaders and readers have “rediscovered” Robert Greenleaf’s writings through books by DePree, Senge, Covey, Wheatley, Autry, and many other popular writers.

2. SERVANT LEADERSHIPAND BOARD GOVERNANCE

A second major application of servant leadership is its pivotal role as the theoretical and ethical basis for “trustee education.” Greenleaf wrote extensively on servant leadership as it applies to the roles of boards of directors and trustees within institutions. His essays on these applications are widely distributed among directors of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. In his essay Trustees as Servants Greenleaf urged trustees to ask 327themselves two central questions: “Whom do you serve?” and “For what purpose?”

Servant leadership suggests that boards of trustees need to undergo a radical shift in how they approach their roles. Trustees who seek to act as servant-leaders can help to create institutions of great depth and quality. Over the past decade, one of America’s largest grant-making foundations (Lilly Endowment Inc.) has sought to encourage the development of programs designed to educate and train not-for-profit boards of trustees to function as servant-leaders. The noted board governance author/consultant/theorist John Carver includes servant leadership as the foundation for his Policy Governance Model.

3. SERVANT LEADERSHIPANDLOCAL COMMUNITIES

The third application of servant leadership concerns its deepening role in community leadership organizations across the country. A growing number of community leadership groups are using Greenleaf Center resources as part of their own education and training efforts. Some have been doing so for more than twenty years.

M. Scott Peck, who has written about the importance of building true community, says the following in A World Waiting to Be Born: “In his work on servant-leadership, Greenleaf posited that the world will be saved if it can develop just three truly well-managed, large institutions— one in the private sector, one in the public sector, and one in the nonprofit sector. He believed—and I know—that such excellence in management will be achieved through an organizational culture of civility routinely utilizing the mode of community.”

4. SERVANT LEADERSHIPAND EDUCATION

The fourth application involves servant leadership in experiential education and academic programs.

• During the past thirty years experiential education programs of all sorts have sprung up in colleges and universities—and, increasingly, in secondary schools, too. Experiential education, or “learning by doing,” is now a part of most students’ educational experience. Around 1980, a number of educators began to write about the linkage between the servant-leader concept and 328experiential learning under a new term called “service-learning.” Among other educational institutions, the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE) emphasizes service-learning as one of its major program areas. In 1990 NSEE published a massive three-volume work called Combining Service and Learning: A Resource Book for Community and Public Service (Jane C. Kendall and Associates, Editors), which brought together numerous articles and papers about service-learning—several dozen of which discuss servant leadership as the philosophical basis for experiential learning programs.
• A second educational application of servant leadership concerns its use in both formal and informal education and training programs. This is taking place through leadership and management courses in colleges and universities, as well as through corporate training and development programs. A number of undergraduate and graduate courses on management and leadership incorporate servant leadership within their course curricula, and some colleges and universities now offer specific courses on servant leadership. In the area of corporate education, many management and leadership consultants now utilize servant leadership materials as part of their ongoing work with corporate development programs, including U.S.Cellular, TDIndus-tries, and the Singapore Police Department. Through internal training and education, institutions are discovering that servant leadership can truly improve how business is developed and conducted, while still successfully turning a profit.

5. SERVANT LEADERSHIPAND THE GROWTHOFINDIVIDUALS

A fifth application of servant leadership involves its use in programs relating to personal growth and transformation. Servant leadership operates at both the institutional and personal levels. For individuals it offers a means to personal growth—spiritually, professionally, emotionally, and intellectually. It has ties to the ideas of M. Scott Peck (A World Waiting To Be Born), Parker Palmer (The Active Life), Ann McGee-Cooper (You Don’t Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted!), and others who have written on expanding human potential. A particular strength of servant leadership is that it encourages everyone to actively seek opportunities to both serve and lead others, thereby setting up the potential for raising the quality of life throughout society.

6. SERVANT LEADERSHIP AND MULTICULTURALISM

For some people, the word servant prompts an immediate negative connotation, due to the oppression that many people—particularly women and people of color—have historically endured. For some, it may take a while to accept the positive usage of this word servant. Those who are willing to dig deeper understand the inherent spiritual nature of what is intended by the pairing of servant and leader. The startling paradox of the term servant leadership often serves to prompt new insights.

In an article titled, “Pluralistic Reflections on Servant-Leadership,” noted Latina leadership consultant Juana Bordas has written: “Many women, minorities and people of color have long traditions of servant leadership in their cultures. Servant leadership has very old roots in many of the indigenous cultures. Cultures that were holistic, cooperative, communal, intuitive and spiritual. These cultures centered on being guardians of the future and respecting the ancestors who walked before.” There is a growing body of literature on servant leadership by people of color, and internationally by many non-Western writers and teachers.

Women leaders and authors are writing and speaking about servant leadership as a twenty-first century leadership philosophy that is most appropriate for both women and men to embrace. Patsy Sampson, former president of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, is one such person. In an essay on women and servant leadership she writes: “So-called (service-oriented) feminine characteristics are exactly those which are consonant with the very best qualities of servant-leadership.”

III. GREENLEAF’S GREATEST LEGACY: THE GREENLEAF CENTER FOR SERVANT LEADERSHIP

Robert Greenleaf’s greatest institutional legacy is undoubtedly his establishment in 1964 of The Center for Applied Ethics, renamed the Robert K. Greenleaf Center in 1985. Over a twenty-five year period from 1964 to 3301989, Bob Greenleaf made his greatest and most lasting contributions to the world through the not-for-profit organization which he founded. Throughout this most important quarter of a century of Bob Greenleaf’s life, The Greenleaf Center provided him with the organizational structure from which he wrote and published, pursued a series of grant-funded research-and-writing projects: and, through which he further shared his wisdom as a lecturer, consultant, and facilitator with numerous institutions.

Bob Greenleaf was a paradoxical man, and it should come as no surprise that this element of paradox would find expression within both his attitude and approach to even this very organization which he founded. Throughout the first twenty-five years of The Greenleaf Center’s existence, Bob Greenleaf, the self-proclaimed student of how things get done in organizations, consciously chose to maintain the Center as a hip-pocket organization to support his own work. In the early years he was the sole staff person for the Center. Eventually he did hire a part-time assistant to help in responding to orders for his essays. And in the 1980s, as his declining health began to overtake him, the Center had two part-time directors, Dick Broholm (1984–88) and Kate Crane (1988–1990). However, I believe that Bob Greenleaf knew all too well the challenges that come with growing-and-sustaining even small organizations (fundraising, personnel issues, fiscal management, board relations, public relations, programs, etc.), as well as his own limitations-and-strengths, and that Bob very deliberately chose to keep the organization intentionally small and in service to those things which he felt he could do best.

While this clearly worked quite well for Bob Greenleaf during the first twenty-five years of The Greenleaf Center’s existence, it also meant that by 1989 when Bob could no longer continue to work, The Greenleaf Center found itself in the unenviable position of having no existing programs or services (other than the sale of Bob’s own essays and books), no real savings to fall back upon, limited staff leadership, and no significant sources of revenue capable of sustaining even the very small organization that it was at the time. The Center’s financial support that year came almost entirely in the form of a $70,000 operational grant which had been given to it by Lilly Endowment. In 1989, Lilly Endowment had given the Greenleaf Center a three-year operational support grant which came with the message that this would be the last grant of its kind to the Center. This grant was made with the clear understanding that The 331Greenleaf Center would have to find a way to make it on its own in the future, if that was even possible.

The combination of Bob’s “second” retirement from The Greenleaf Center in 1989 (his “first” retirement had come when he left AT&T after thirty-eight years to establish The Center in 1964) and the final “operational” grant from Lilly Endowment prompted the Center’s board to make a series of decisions. Two of the board’s major decisions were moving The Greenleaf Center from the Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts to Indianapolis, Indiana, and hiring its first full-time director. The choice of Indianapolis as a new base for The Green-leaf Center occurred for two reasons:

First, because of Bob Greenleaf’s long affiliation with Lilly Endowment, and the Endowment’s many grants to Indiana organizations encouraging trustee education, Bob’s writings on servant leadership, and especially his essay, “Trustees as Servants,” came to be known as an important source of wisdom literature in Indiana. There was a built-in audience for his writings.

Second, when Bob was told that it might be in the Center’s best interests to relocate, he replied that all things being equal he would like to see the Greenleaf Center move to his home state of Indiana. And so, in November of 1989 the Greenleaf Center’s board began to advertise in several publications for a director.

I came to the Center through what I believe was an incredible example of synchronicity-in-action. In the Fall of 1989 my wife, Beth, learned that we were expecting a second child. We had been happily living-and-working in Philadelphia for a dozen years, but this news caused us to begin thinking about moving back to our home state where our children could be closer to their grandparents and other relatives. I called the circulation office of The Indianapolis Star, and arranged to begin receiving the Sunday edition of the paper by mail as a source of job notices. As luck would have it, the first Sunday paper I received contained what turned out to be the last of three postings advertising The Greenleaf Center’s search for a new director.

As I read the description, I couldn’t believe how close a match the position description was with my own skills and interests. We were also both Quakers, and I had first encountered Bob Greenleaf’s writings on servant leadership in 1982 while working at Friends Journal, a magazine of The Religious Society of Friends. Throughout the 1970s and 80s Bob had published a half-dozen articles in Friends Journal, and I had been taken by 332his persuasive ideas on servant leadership. Between the position description, my prior awareness of Bob Greenleaf and servant leadership, and certain similarities in our backgrounds (both of us having grown up in Indiana; both of us having moved to large Eastern cities after college— Bob to New York City, myself to Philadelphia; both of us having spent a good deal of our professional and personal time in various kinds of writing; and both of us being somewhat strong-willed introverts who preferred to work “behind-the-scene” whenever possible), the confluence of The Greenleaf Center’s relocation and need for a director, coupled with my own personal desires and interests, immediately seemed like a perfect match.

Eventually I was offered, and accepted, the role of executive director for The Greenleaf Center. One month later we moved from Philadelphia back to Indiana, and I shepherded the relocation of the Greenleaf Center’s office from Newton Center, Massachusetts to Indianapolis.

The details of how I worked to first stabilize and then build the Center’s operations are best left to another time, but they encompassed a broad range of innovative elements of organizational growth—creating revenue sources, raising public awareness, establishing marketing plans, creating the means and vehicles for individual and organizational support, establishing relationships with many different people, working with our own board, developing grant proposals linked to sustainable end-products, establishing a certain entrepreneurial, “can-do” spirit, and being open to the notion of figuratively walking through a number of doors that opened up in ways that could not have been predicted. In the years since then the Greenleaf Center has been able to establish—and grow—numerous earned revenue streams in support of its mission, and it has succeeded in attracting a succession of project-focused grants from Lilly Endowment, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and others.

Another critical decision that I made in the early months of 1990 involved my making a fundamental commitment to doing all that I could to ensure that The Greenleaf Center would continue to hold at its core work the original servant leadership ideas and writings by Bob Greenleaf, while simultaneously establishing an equally strong commitment to expanding his servant leadership ideas in new directions, and encouraging the emergence of many new “voices” of servant leadership These twin commitments have been profoundly crucial for the significant growth of The Greenleaf Center ever since.

Now in our 40th year, The Greenleaf Center is an international, not-for-profit educational organization that seeks to encourage the understanding and practice of servant leadership. The Center’s mission is to fundamentally improve the caring and quality of all institutions through servant leadership.

In recent years, The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership has experienced tremendous growth and expansion, with programs that now include: the worldwide sales of more than 130 books, essays, and videotapes on servant leadership; a research-and-publications effort through which we have produced and published dozens of new resources on servant leadership since 1990; a worldwide membership program involving individuals and institutions; a servant-leader speakers bureau; a variety of tailored workshops and seminars; a reading-and-dialogue program; and our annual International Conference on Servant Leadership. A number of notable Greenleaf Center members have spoken at our annual conferences, including James Autry, Peter Block, Max DePree, Stephen Covey, Meg Wheatley, M. Scott Peck, and Peter Senge, to name but a few.

The Greenleaf Center now encompasses offices located in Australia/New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and at its global headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Servant leadership books and essays have been translated into more than a dozen different languages. Bob Greenleaf’s key essay, The Servant as Leader, is now available in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish editions. Our books have also been translated into Korean, Bahasa Indonesian, and other languages.

Life is full of curious and meaningful paradoxes. Servant leadership is one such paradox that has slowly but surely gained hundreds of thousands of adherents. The seeds initially planted by Bob Greenleaf over thirty-five years ago have begun to sprout in many institutions, as well as in the hearts of many who long to improve the human condition. Don Frick’s fine biography of Robert Greenleaf is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on servant leadership, and it serves to underscore the paradoxical nature of Bob Greenleaf, the man. Of course, the creations of people (paintings, music, books, ideas, organizations, etc.) generally have the benefit of being perceived as a completed end-product, and thus appear to be “finished” in a way that we generally understand and find satisfying. As human beings, we all have our own strengths and 334weaknesses, and our lives are inevitably messier than any of our creations. What I find so inspirational about Bob Greenleaf’s life is that he eventually came to understand both his conscious and unconscious mind to the degree that he was able to learn and grow as a person, and then to find ways to synthesize his ideas into what we now call “servant leadership.” In so doing, he has influenced several generations of seekers and has inspired many of us in our shared goal of creating a better, more caring society.

What a rare legacy to leave behind, and through a life lived extraordinarily well.

For more information on servant leadership resources
and programs contact:

The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership

921 E. 86th Street, Suite 200

Indianapolis, IN 46240

Phone: 317-259-1241

Fax: 317-259-0560

Website: www.greenleaf.org

_______

Larry C. Spears has served as President & CEO of The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership since 1990. During the 1970s and 80s Larry also worked with the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium, The Philadelphia Center, and Friends Journal. He is the editor/co-editor of nine books on servant leadership, which now include five posthumously-published books of essays by Robert K. Greenleaf, plus four anthologies on contemporary practices of servant leadership: Practicing Servant-Leadership (with Michele Lawrence), 2004; The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path (with Hamilton Beazley and Julie Beggs), 2003; Servant Leadership, 25th Anniversary Edition, 2002; Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the 21st Century (with Michele Lawrence), 2002; The Power of Servant-Leadership, 1998; Insights on Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit and Servant-Leadership, 1998; On Becoming a Servant-Leader (with Don Frick), 1996; Seeker and Servant (with Anne Fraker), 1996; and Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K. Greenleaf’s Theory of Servant Leadership Influenced Today’s Top Management Thinkers, 1995. Over the past 25 years Larry has published several hundred articles that have appeared in a variety of books and other publications. He serves as series editor for the Voices of Servant-Leadership Essay Series, 335published by The Greenleaf Center, and the founder and senior editor of The Greenleaf Center’s quarterly newsletter, The Servant Leader. He is a longtime member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. Larry is both a “conceptualizer” and “operationalizer” with three decades of experience in organizational leadership, entrepreneurial development, and non-profit management, and he has conceived and written dozens of successful grant projects over the years that total several million dollars. For more information on servant leadership contact The Greenleaf Center, 921 E. 86th St., Suite 200, Indianapolis, IN 46240; phone: 317-259-1241; or online at www.greenleaf.org.

Larry C. Spears

President & CEO, The Robert K. Greenleaf

Center for Servant Leadership