The author and professor Ken Bain once wrote, “Teaching is one of the human endeavors that rarely benefits from its past ... For the most part, [great teachers’] insights die with them, and subsequent generations must discover anew the wisdom that drove their practices.”

I have come to believe that this observation may apply even more to mission-driven leaders. When I was winding down my 18-year run leading Grameen Foundation, which I established in 1997 after a decade of mentorship under the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, I embarked on a process of documenting the most important things that I had learned along the way. It was an alternatively soulful, disturbing, enjoyable, cleansing, and arduous process. The 800 pages I churned out were ultimately chiseled into 300 pages and released in 2019 as Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship.

Unlike most non-profit leadership memoirs, I focused on insights rather than on my accomplishments. As one reviewer noted, it was more mea culpa than self-congratulation. Each story contained ideas, techniques, and practices that I came to value, use, and depend on. In all cases, I wished I had learned them earlier. The last third of the book focused on self-care for mission-driven leaders. The messages seemed to resonate with many readers and reviewers, including this one.

On May 18, 2021, a revised edition of this book came out with a new introduction and an epilogue focused on leading during a crisis. The new material was written for those navigating COVID-19, something that I could not have foreseen when the first edition was published. The excerpt below is taken from the epilogue. It attempts to channel lessons I learned from previous society-wide crises, which, while different in nature, are still relevant to leading a mission-driven organization during a pandemic and its aftermath.

Read the full article about organization resilience by Alex Counts at Stanford Social Innovation Review.