New Giants Rising: How Leaders Can Help People and Companies Grow During the Followership Crisis

The greatest concern for all Americans today - leaders and followers alike – is how their prosperity seems to depend on a shrinking foundation of technology-only growth. And the onset of artificial intelligence only threatens to marginalize people even more with job loss and increasing isolation inside the few remaining jobs that it will leave behind.

This book helps us understand that business growth fueled by labor productivity does not rely on leadership as we’ve come to celebrate it, but on our ability to sustain loyalty and commitment to one another– a following if you will - inside and outside our workplaces. When we recognize and understand our historical Followership Cycles, we can begin to restore our workplaces to their lost role as a place to meet the demand of all Americans for a better future.

This illuminating book:

• Provides a new, sustainable growth model based in the socioeconomic realities of modern America and the world it wants to lead – a new Followership System.
• Tells the story of how one profession, on the brink of disappearing into irrelevance, will lead the new Decision Economy into the 21st century.
• Demonstrates the development of the "leaderless" specialists who will manage evidence together to pursue a Reason-to-Grow.
• Stresses the importance of charging all C-Suite executives with leading a continuous process of discovering, articulating and then defending those stakeholder agreements to share purpose.
• Reveals, not the technology infrastructure, but the social architecture that organizations will use to build new social capital – the Followership that will propel our New Giants to future greatness.

New Giants Rising takes us on a journey of the Followership Cycles of our recent past. And, more importantly, it puts forth a plan of action - voiced very simply by Henry Ford during the last cycle over a century ago when he faced the same moment then as we do now: "Coming Together is the Start. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success."

Paul Fisher provides commentary at The Followership Zone. There he brings context to today’s world by illustrating the causes of the increasing distance between the lives we live and our beliefs -- and the hardening political barriers forming among us because of this growing gap. He does this using the lens of our emerging Followership Agreements – social reorganization that will create the new American rising middle-class.

Paul is the author of New Giants Rising: How Leaders Can Help People and Companies Grow During the Followership Crisis. Throughout a decades-long career in the CPA profession, he quietly observed the human toll taken by the long, slow decline of the manufacturing and consumption economy. At the same time, he began to understand the beginnings of the rise of what would replace that economy and the social glue that would form a new cohesive society – our 21^st century Melting Pot.

Today, we are getting a look at what that people-glue looks like because of Paul’s insightful work aimed at understanding how and why social reorganization happens to us – and what people, organizations and society can do to move much more quickly to the better future we all deserve.

Paul has created The Followership Zone in downtown Chicago where he sleeps, eats, writes, thinks and walks the streets – "skating to where the puck is going."