When the Box Finally Arrives: Launching The Sage Works Guide to Global Leadership

In late January, a long-awaited box landed on my doorstep: the first author copies of The Sage Works Guide to Global Leadership.

I happened to be home with my family when the package arrived, so we unboxed it together. There’s something grounding about sharing that kind of moment. After months of late‑night writing and second‑guessing entire chapters, you finally hold the finished product in your hands.

What is Guide to Global Leadership?

Guide to Global Leadership is a reference book published by Sage, an academic publishing house. It's intended for students, emerging professors, and practitioners.

It began years ago as a tangle of research notes compiled during my Ph.D. studies. Leadership scholars tell us through theory that global leadership rarely unfolds in a straight line, no matter how much we want to romanticize it. I wanted to write about how those theories play out and become intertwined in contemporary practice, across cultures.

And I wanted to make it clear that global leadership cannot be thought of as a private-sector phenomenon alone. We wouldn't have global leadership at all without the intertwinement of internationally-oriented government leaders (especially trade-focused leaders) and NGO involvement.

What Guide to Global Leadership Tries to Do

Across its chapters, Guide to Global Leadership goes into followership, ethics, cross‑cultural communication, innovation, sustainability, geopolitics, change leadership, talent strategy, and crisis management.

I didn't hesitate to call out some of the hidden corners of global leadership in practice, like how leadership power is communicated through rules, policies, and processes that we'd often prefer to think of as boring or benign aspects of organizational life, but cause trouble in the leader-follower dynamic when an empathy gap goes unnoticed.

And of course, there's a robust chapter on what I spent my earlier career on: customer experience. That chapter includes some of the profession's biggest topics, including red tape, dark patterns, sludge, ethics, reputation management, and the evolving consumer law. I spend several pages discussing the outlier practices coming front-and-center in boundaryless fashion: circular design, inclusion, and the fast-growing movement toward sludge audits.

Case Examples in Guide to Global Leadership

The book packs in dozens of real-world examples and full case studies, including some of my full-length Sage Business Cases that have already been or are about to be published separately:

• Istanbul Airport (Sage Editor's Choice Award recipient for best global business case)

• OpenAI (Sage Editor's Choice Award recipient for best leadership business case)

• OECD

• New South Wales Government, Australia

• Bayer

• Starbucks

• Shein

• Gucci

• IKEA

• 3M

• Yahoo!

• Volkswagen

• U.S Department of Veterans Affairs

• NBA Africa's Triple Double

• The 2018 Thai cave rescue

Human Wisdom in Guide to Global Leadership

In writing the book, I drew from the experiences of global leaders across industries, to whom I am especially grateful, including:

• Ankesh Agarwal, CCXP, former Director of Group Customer Experience at Majid Al-Futtaim

• Michelle Batt, customer experience advisor and former telecoms industry executive

• The late Phyllis Bonanno, who was an advisor to President Lyndon Johnson and a retired executive board member for multiple companies

• Julie Hughes, President of the U.S. Fashion Industry Association

• Tushar Jain, CEO of Enthu.AI

• Christan Johnson, CEO and Founder of Sensa Group

• Greg Melia, CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association

• Anita Siassios, privacy officer at Suncorp Bank (ANZ Group)

• Sandra Taylor, wine industry expert and author of Values & Vines, A Consumer's Guide to Sustainable Wine

• Plus many more who asked to stay anonymous

My Goal for Guide to Global Leadership

My goal in sharing this book with the world was to write something realistic. Something that reflected leaders' broad ecosystems in play every day. And I wanted to honor and include the scholarly theories that round out our understanding of global leadership better than anecdotes alone can.

I’m deeply grateful to the editors at Sage and to the students, colleagues, and practitioners whose insights shaped this journey.

And mostly, I’m just thankful — because sometimes the most meaningful milestones arrive quietly, in a cardboard box on your front step.

Order The Sage Works Guide to Global Leadership directly from Sage Publishing here. Follow me on LinkedIn.