The Social Leadership Handbook has landed!

Our UK office is on the third floor, a choice i regret when carrying a thousand books up the back stairs. Today, the Social Leadership Handbook has arrived from the printers in Latvia. Latvia? Yes, via a production editor in Southampton, a printing company in Chelmsford and writing that took place in a hundred cafes and trains around the world. Welcome to the Social Age, where formal mechanisms of publishing and control are subverted by agile entities collaborating fast.

The Social Leadership Handbook has landed, almost a year after i started writing it on a retreat in Cornwall.

As with any book in the Social Age, it’s almost out of date before the ink is dry, but what it represents is a foundation, a collection of everything i’ve written around the subject so far, crystallised into a structure and syllabus. It’s coherent in a way that disparate blog posts and Slideshare decks can never be. It’s one more step on our journey to understand the new realities of the Social Age.

And i’m proud.

Standing there, with a pallet full of boxes, surrounded by friends and cracking open the cider on a sunny afternoon, it feels like a milestone. It’s not the whole journey, but it’s an important step.

We launch it next week at Learning Live in London, then a series of events around the world, but i’m taking today to savour the moment, to thank those people in our community who have made it happen, whose challenges, inspiration and support have led me down this road.

The Social Leadership Handbook will be available to buy from 10th September, but you can pre-order a copy here.