This book is for pathfinders— product, services, business, and nonprofit managers searching for ways to reach beyond the artificial barriers that constrain innovation and make “work” harder. Inspired by real life trailblazers and their own experiences, the authors decode the secrets of achieving breakthrough success at both organizational and interpersonal levels. Learn to use their methodology with the help of checklists and detailed examples that will transform your thinking and skills.

The nature and science of compassion encompasses many aspects of human behavior, social and organizational experience, with resultant debate about its definition, meaning and application. Research, theorizing and scholarship is spread across a wide range of methodological, disciplinary, historical, and cultural perspectives including psychology, sociology, psychosocial studies, organizational science, inter/national politics, and evolutionary studies. Global concerns relating to the climate crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, and mass movements of displaced people all point to an urgent need for compassion in all human interactions. New and innovative interdisciplinary approaches, agendas, and paradigms are needed to both compliment, and critique, existing understandings of the meaning and applications of compassion in all its diverse and complex forms. In a world where there appears to be increasing demand for simplification and quantification from governments and policy makers, questions must be asked about what this means for psychology and social science research. The tendency towards post/positivist reductionism has led to critiques that universities have become factories that produce sterile, derivative, unimaginative writing. 21st-century universities have been described as ‘anxiety machines’, lacking in compassion, and creating more competition and stress than knowledge. Arguably, research into compassion should take place in compassionate disciplinary and institutional cultures. We all have a role to play in addressing the lack of compassion in universities, which will involve an institutional level shift from individual-level competition to group-level collaboration. Importantly, recent advances in compassion research promise gains in understanding in both the science and neuroscience of human experience, and in applications of that work to improve humankind and the world around us. Qualitative research in psychology and psychosocial approaches, although becoming more visible, still remain a minority endeavor within the discipline. This Research Topic offers the opportunity to foreground the values and virtues of qualitative psychology, alongside more tried and tested approaches.

This is a book of hope at a time when just about everyone but Marvin Olasky has lost hope. The topic is poverty and the underclass. The profound truth that Marvin Olasky forces us to confront is that the problems of the underclass are not caused by poverty. Some of them are exacerbated by poverty, but we know that they need not be caused by poverty, for poverty has been the condition of the vast majority of human communities since the dawn of history, and they have for the most part been communities of stable families, nurtured children, and low crime. It is wrong to think that writing checks will end the problems of the underclass, or even reduce them. - Preface.

Leadership is hard. How can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness in getting the job done? A global pandemic, economic volatility, natural disasters, civil and political unrest. From New York to Barcelona to Hong Kong, it can feel as if the world as we know it is coming apart. Through it all, our human spirit is being tested. Now more than ever, it's imperative for leaders to demonstrate compassion. But in hard times like these, leaders need to make hard decisions—deliver negative feedback, make difficult choices that disappoint people, and in some cases lay people off. How do you do the hard things that come with the responsibility of leadership while remaining a good human being and bringing out the best in others? Most people think we have to make a binary choice between being a good human being and being a tough, effective leader. But this is a false dichotomy. Being human and doing what needs to be done are not mutually exclusive. In truth, doing hard things and making difficult decisions is often the most compassionate thing to do. As founder and CEO of Potential Project, Rasmus Hougaard and his longtime coauthor, Jacqueline Carter, show in this powerful, practical book, you must always balance caring for your people with leadership wisdom and effectiveness. Using data from thousands of leaders, employees, and companies in nearly a hundred countries, the authors find that when leaders bring the right balance of compassion and wisdom to the job, they foster much higher levels of employee engagement, performance, loyalty, and well-being in their people. With rich examples from Netflix, IKEA, Unilever, and many other global companies, as well as practical tools and advice for leaders and managers at any level, Compassionate Leadership is your indispensable guide to doing the hard work of leadership in a human way.

"In Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science - coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine - demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place."--Amazon.

Presenting an outline of the four necessary steps for meeting suffering with compassion, this insightful book shows how to build a capacity for compassion into the structures and practices of an organization. --