Jennifer Kahnweiler and the Second Edition of The Introverted Leader

Our conception of  leadership has become more inclusive in recent years, and one key area of inclusion is the idea that introverts can be terrific leaders. The stereotypical image has been the larger-than-life extrovert leader, but fortunately this type of thinking is evolving.

One of the major conversation-changers was the first edition of Jennifer Kahnweiler’s The Introverted Leader, published in 2009. Now, her new second edition adds a considerable amount of fresh, updated material and it reflects the fact that we not only understand more about how and why introverts have solid leadership qualities, but also that introversion has become a hot topic inside and outside the workplace.

One of the major reasons for that is Susan Cain’s mega-best-selling 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. As it happens, Jennifer wrote an endorsement that was quoted in the book, and Susan Cain provided a top-of-front-cover endorsement for Jennifer’s 2013 book Quiet Influence: The Introvert’s Guide to Making a Difference: “This extraordinary book shows that you don’t have to raise your volume to have a voice.” More recently, an excerpt from Chapter 6 of second edition of The Introverted Leader appears on Cain’s Quiet Revolution website, as does an excerpt from Jennifer’s 2015 book The Genius of Opposites: How Introverts and Extroverts Achieve Extraordinary Results Together, as well as a response from Jennifer to a question from one of Cain’s readers, in the post “How Extroverts and Introverts Can Understand Each Other.”

Jennifer’s publisher is Berrett-Koehler, which also published my first book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in 2009. She and I have been friends since then, and I’ve always found her to be friendly and generous with her time and expertise. Among other things, she gave me the opportunity to write a guest post for her blog in 2013, “Quiet Influence the Peter Drucker Way,” during the launch of my second book (published by McGraw-Hill), Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way.

Many librarians and information professionals are introverts, and can benefit from Jennifer’s message. I’ve introduced my students at the Catholic University Dept. of Library and Information Science to Jennifer’s work, and indeed she spoke at the 2014 American Library Association annual conference in Las Vegas. In a brief clip on YouTube, she succinctly describes the basic concept of introversion and how it relates to leadership, and how it can benefit people attending the conference. After her presentation, American Libraries magazine published the article “Championing Introverts: Bestselling author discusses how quiet influencers can change the world.”

You can read, listen to and view more of the activity around the new book via this page of Jennifer’s website, including her recent post, “Seeking the Next Wave of Introverted Leaders,” for the BK blog; and her guest post, “Now Is The Time for Introverted Leaders,” on the blog of fellow BK author Julie Winkle Giulioni.

Introverts and extroverts both stand to gain from absorbing the wisdom in the new edition of The Introverted Leader. As Jennifer points out at the conclusion of Chapter 1, “You have choices as to how you respond to your reality.”