Your Leadership Moment

What Happens When Everyone Leads?

Anyone can lead. You don't have to be a CEO or work in a management position. Your Leadership Moment provides practical tools, techniques and inspiration to discover your leadership potential. It combines personal and real-world anecdotes with a framework for Adaptive Leadership that helps you seize your leadership moments.

In this book, discover what a Leadership Moment is, the key concepts of Adaptive Leadership, how to stop perfectly solving the wrong problems and start creatively solving the right problems, and how to make meaningful change.

Author and leadership expert Eric Martin has brought leadership development to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. His work draws on Adaptive Leadership, an unconventional and provocative leadership practice developed at Harvard by Drs. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky - and further refined by Alexander Grashow. Your Leadership Moment teaches Eric’s expansion and distillation of Adaptive Leadership in a way everyone can understand.

What people are saying

"Eric Martin combines relentless optimism with hard-nosed realism in powerful stories of people like you and me who saw a leadership opportunity and refused to sit on the sidelines. Each of us has the potential for a leadership moment. Reading this book will help you find yours."

Dr. Marty Linsky
Faculty, Harvard Kennedy School & Author, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
"An adaptive leadership truth-telling about defining moments of our times. A compelling read for people and companies who seek to challenge the status quo and survive."

Lauren Serota
Patagonia, Head of Performance & Talent
"The critical skill that leaders need today is the ability to work across lines of difference to create meaningful change that benefits everyone, not just the privileged few. Your Leadership Moment allows readers to build that skill through touching, provocative and deeply human stories, and its call for everyone, regardless of their circumstances, to choose to lead."

Jacqueline Novogratz
Founder & CEO, Acumen
"Eric Martin invites us to consider the power of leadership moments to influence change both within and outside of corporate walls. Creating a sustainable future requires nothing less than each of us seizing these moments."

Euan Murray
The Sustainability Consortium CEO

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About the Author

The thought,What will my kids make of this in 50 years? runs through my mind as I wrote this book and this bio. Hopefully what's here provides helpful context …

Curious by nature, Eric’s search for the ‘meaning of it all’ took him down varied paths. Studying initially as an engineer, he cast off science and math to learn the culture, ways and language of Japan, where he served as a translator for years. Not a believer in love at first sight—until that point—Eric met his future wife Ava Field while she, too, worked as an expat in Japan. The ‘meaning of it all’ took on new life.

After seriously considering a career in medicine, in a fortunate twist he landed instead in the executive office of a Rockefeller-affiliated nonprofit working at the extreme margins of human development and systems change. There he began a long, transformative journey with one of the key architects of Adaptive Leadership. The journey continues.
Today, Eric is a speaker, writer and teacher on the themes of leadership, change, and the evolution of humanity’s relationship to “our home planet.” He founded Adaptive Change Advisors (ACA), which is the premier mission-based Adaptive Leadership organization worldwide. ACA’s mission is to put leadership tools that drive change into the hands of anyone who seeks meaningful outcomes. Eric has been published in Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Environmental Leader, and is the author of the book Your Leadership Moment.

While he hasn’t lived in Detroit for years, he engenders its grit and resilience… and can be found jamming to Motown music with his family at home on many a weekend morning.

Eric has served as an advisor, speaker, or leadership trainer in a variety of places, including: Acumen, Rockefeller Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, US Business Council for Sustainable Development, White House Presidential Personnel Office, United Nations Innovation Network, World Bank, Cornell University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Sustainability Consortium, Democracy Fund, National Academy for Science Engineering & Medicine, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, USAID and The Aspen Institute. His work covers topics such as the next generation of leadership for clean energy, advancing regenerative livelihoods through social enterprise, and influencing a more thoughtful integration of technology into our daily lives.

Book Eric to speak

Author bio

Discussion points

Leadership moments, everyday

Until about twenty years ago, the average executive faced less than two leadership moments per day. Today, the average person—not just executive—faces five or more leadership every day.
Adaptive change is natural

We all change, every day. Studies show that the ability to adapt is the most important skill during times of transition, uncertainty and possibility.
For and of the people

Leadership is no longer—and never was—just the realm of the elite. An explosion in leadership moments means that more and more people are standing up, speaking out, and disrupting the status quo.
You matter

When it comes to leadership moments, how you do anything is how you do everything. Possibility awaits on the other side of the uncertainty and conflict.