Drawn to Challenge: Stories of Creative Leadership in the Public Interest (With Doodles)

Drawing from his experiences as a lawyer, municipal official, and foundation president, Rip Rapson offers two dozen stories of leadership across three decades of civic service. Ranging in weight, complexity, and consequence, the chapters illuminate the rich and expansive potential of principled leadership to improve the ebbs and flows, the rhythms, the contours of contemporary life.

Threaded through the accounts is the recognition that a willingness — indeed, a readiness — to adjust, refashion, or even abandon established decision-making expectations or authorities is an essential ingredient in seeking to crack the most difficult challenges of contemporary life.

Rapson's experiences illustrate how that process can inject dynamism and innovation into public discourse, policy, and practice.

Whether preserving a city's architectural heritage or protecting a irreplaceable wilderness area . . . pursuing an unorthodox run for public office or resetting the trajectory of an iconic American city . . . elevating the transformative power of the arts or amplifying the role of philanthropy in community change . . . using conceptual drawings to clarify public policy challenges or reimagining the future of a failed university.

While acknowledging that challenges from decades past are utterly different from those of today, Rapson argues the imperative of a 21st century leader—whether young, mid-career, or matured—understanding lessons from the past. As new crises emerge, and old ones mutate, our challenges become more multifaceted, interconnected, and intractable. Rapson argues that the principles of leadership must accordingly adapt, evolve, and be transformed. All in service to a more nuanced perspective about how deep, abiding change can be realized.

The two-dozen stories are, moreover, grounded in the proposition that acts of principled leadership are accretive. Our communities— whether defined by group identity, common challenges, shared environments, or collective values — will progress toward the kind of just, equitable, opportunity-rich, and healthful future to which we aspire only when our individual acts of leadership are combined into an alchemy of shared purpose.

Rapson's book illuminates how that can be done. It is must reading for those who aspire to leadership in these impossibly complex and ever-changing times.