Strong Ground

Strong Ground argues, with the care of a researcher and the urgency of a practitioner, that the version of leadership we have been sold for a generation — confident-sounding, certain, performatively tough, fundamentally allergic to the inner work — has been wrong, and that the cost of pretending otherwise has been the burnout, disengagement, and quiet damage that the surrounding culture has come to treat as the natural cost of doing business; the book proposes instead a model in which leadership begins with the unsexy practice of self-mastery — metacognition, emotional intelligence, present-moment awareness, the disciplined pause between stimulus and response, the cultivation and shifting of focus — moves from there into the harder skill of holding paradoxes such as vulnerability and courage, stability and change, and only then enters the operational practices of clarity, balance, and constancy of commitment that distinguish real leaders from those who merely occupy the chair; Brown's deeper claim, repeated by example throughout the book, is that the kind of leader an organization actually needs is the kind of person any of us can become with the appropriate practice, and that the choice to do that practice is itself the choice to live differently in every other domain of one's life.

Brené Brown, Ph.D., is an American researcher, author, and lecturer whose work on courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and human connection has reshaped the public conversation about leadership and emotional life. She is the Brené Brown Endowed Chair at the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent more than two decades conducting qualitative research, and she holds a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. Born in San Antonio in 1965, she earned her bachelor's degree in social work at the University of Texas at Austin and both her master's and doctoral degrees in social work at the University of Houston. She is the author of six previous number-one New York Times bestsellers — The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart — and her 2010 TED talk "The Power of Vulnerability," delivered in Houston, became one of the most-viewed TED talks of all time, with well over sixty million views. She hosts two podcasts on Spotify, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, the latter focused on workplace and leadership topics drawn from her ongoing research. In 2019 she released a Netflix special, The Call to Courage, marking the first time the platform had given a Netflix Original treatment to a researcher. Her work has been adopted by organizations ranging from professional sports teams to military units to Fortune 500 companies, and the Daring Way curriculum she developed has been used to train tens of thousands of facilitators worldwide. She lives in Houston with her husband Steve, a pediatrician, and their two children. Strong Ground, part of the Dare to Lead series, continues a body of work that has, over two decades, redefined what serious thinking about leadership can look like when it takes vulnerability, honesty, and inner discipline as its starting points.