Writing for eJP, Laura Herman and Deirdre Munley of JPro share how they introduced chavruta-based supervision within their organization, creating a model focused on curiosity, trust, and mutual respect. Bringing the centuries-old Jewish tradition of paired learning into their supervisor-supervisee relationship opened up new ways to deepen professional conversations and build meaningful partnerships. The chavruta model, adaptable to both Jewish and secular texts, can provide workplace pairs a structured way to enhance relationships while exploring professional growth together.

MIT SMR: Manage Boundaries Better With Your Team

Gallup: Managers Feel More Connected to Their Organization's Culture

Greater Good: Why Play at Work Can Inspire Employees to Take Risks

MIT SMR: Building Mastery: What Leaders Do That Helps — or Impedes

HBR: What the Best Leadership Teams Do Right

First Round Review: Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

HBR: Boards Need a New Approach to Technology

NonProfitPRO: Managing the Relational Aspect of Nonprofit Governance

Candid: Strong boards make strong nonprofits: What you need to know

Here's what the Leading Edge team is learning about culture, executives, and boards this month.

What We're Learning | Leading Edge

News and Ideas | Leading Edge

News & Ideas

Looking back and looking ahead: Lessons from a year of crises

Writing for eJewishPhilanthropy, Rachel Garbow Monroe (President & CEO of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and past Leading Edge Board Chair) reflects on a tumultuous year for Jewish and global communities and highlights key strategies for effective philanthropy during times of crisis. Looking to the future with hope, she invites funders and leaders to actively listen to both grantees and staff, embrace learning and growing, and to lead with kindness as all those in the sector continue the important work of striving to make the world a better place.

Chronicle of Philanthropy: Show How Your Nonprofit Is Making a Difference: 10 Dos and Don’ts

Journal of Management Studies: Not the Time to be Humble! When and Why Leader Humility Enhances and Deteriorates Evaluations on Leader Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Leader

Culture First (podcast): Seth Godin on building a culture of impact

SSIR: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. So Make Culture Your Focus.

SHRM: How to Model Civility for a Better Workplace Culture

AIHR: 9 Box Grid: A Practitioner’s Guide [FREE Template for Talent Management]

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Can Elections Ever Be Normal Again? These 22 Nonprofit Leaders Have a Plan.

Joan Garry Consulting: A Seat at the Table: Why (Some) Staff Should Be Present At Board Meetings

SSIR: The Three-Legged Stool of Readiness-Centered Founder Transitions

One week from today will be a full year since October 7th, 2023. And later this week, we will begin the High Holiday season with Rosh Hashanah and enter a new Jewish year. There is so much one could say about the year that has passed, the year to come, and the prospect of trying to celebrate the holidays in the long shadow of such horrors.

I want to call your attention to a simple fact: Life can encounter us alone and can encounter us together. We are each individuals, and we are all a collective.

In the shadow of Oct 7th, we are a collective. In the post-October 7th world, the global Jewish community has pulled together in a way we haven’t seen in decades. There has been an enormous sense of collective mourning, of a collective fate and future, not to mention a collective experience of rising antisemitism. There has been new interest in Jewish connections and Jewish learning. 

To some degree, there has also been a sense of collective action — but on the level of action, there have also been painful divisions. And that brings us to the other side of the scale: 

In the shadow of Oct 7th, we are individuals. In the weeks and months following October 7th, I spoke with countless Jewish communal leaders about how their teams and organizations were faring as the crisis unfolded. One theme arose again and again: Different people in the field were having very different experiences. Some people were intensely connected to Israel and emotionally involved. Others were less connected both socially and emotionally. Some organizations had work that was directly connected to responding to needs that came from the attacks, while others were trying to meet their team’s emotional needs while continuing their work not directly connected to Israel or antisemitism. 

Meanwhile, painful divisions arose across ideologies and (to some extent) generations, around views of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These divisions inflamed preexisting polarization that has worsened in North America over the past half decade, from which the Jewish nonprofit sector has not been exempt.

It is tempting to ignore, or even to decry, one side or the other of this truth — to put down our individuality for the sake of the collective, or shun the collective because of our individual differences. But either one would be a mistake. We have to hold both sides of the tension — we have to be individuals in a collective, e pluribus unum.

How do we hold both sides? How do we honor our individuality and our collectivity at once?

The answer is relationships. At a time of “personal brands” and the gig economy, of rising reliance on robots for human thinking and human work, of a literal epidemic of loneliness and isolation, of division, of hatred and war, we need to double down on human relationships. Relationships are how we build culture, how we bridge differences, and how we reconcile our individual and collective natures. Relationships are the work.

Interestingly, Judaism is full of “relationship technologies,” from traditional transportation restrictions on Shabbat causing some communities to be physically close-knit to the idea of a minyan (prayer quorum) bringing people together, and more. Recently, at a Leading Edge alumni forum focused on shared leadership, Joshua Foer noted how powerful the traditional Jewish practice of ḥavruta can be. Ḥavruta is paired learning in traditional Jewish text study, based on the idea that two will learn far more deeply than one, because “iron sharpens iron.” Ḥavruta teaches us to challenge each other supportively, to oppose each other collaboratively, to argue with each other in good faith and while extending each other the benefit of the doubt. It is a remarkable technology for creating fruitful intellectual partnerships. (I met my wife at Pardes, when we were assigned to one another as ḥavruta partners. Ḥavruta technology is powerful indeed.) 

The Jewish Fall Holidays are another “relationship technology,” a powerful bridge of these two sides of human nature.

On the Fall Holidays, we are individuals. The High Holiday liturgy is full of personal development, personal repentance, personal relationships with God, and the divine judgment of individuals. There is an individual obligation to eat in the sukkah, and to wave a set of four species that we individually own. During the Hallel recitation of Psalms, we sing, “ki ani avdekha,” “for I am [singular] Your servant”. As we celebrate Simḥat Torah and restart the cycle of annual Torah reading, we remember that there is an individual obligation to study Torah. 

But on the Fall Holidays, we are also a collective. On Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the “birthday of the world” and the creation of all humanity. In Yom Kippur’s “vidui” confession, we sing “ashamnu, bagadnu” (“we have trespassed, we have betrayed”) in the plural, not the singular. We sing “ki anu amekha,” “for we are [plural] your nation”. In synagogue and in the Sukkah we come together physically with others. When we shake the four species, in part that symbolizes bringing together different kinds of people. We may have an individual obligation to study Torah, but Simḥat Torah and the annual cycle gives us a communal calendar to make it a shared enterprise.

As we come together to commemorate a year since October 7th and to take the High Holiday journey together, let’s do so in the spirit of relationship — the spirit of holding fast to our individuality and to our shared community. Let’s hold the hostages, the injured, the mourners, the displaced, the IDF soldiers, and those still in harm’s way centrally in our hearts, minds, and prayers. Let’s hold also the innocent people in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere who are tragically being killed, injured, and displaced by a war they never asked Hamas and Hezbollah to start. Let’s think of those throughout the world who are suffering, whether in Sudan, Armenia, Ukraine, or anywhere else. 

And when we differ, as we must, in how we think and feel about all these terrible things, let’s think of the shared heartbeat of compassion that animates us all across our differences. Let’s not give up on each other — as individuals, or as members of a shared community. Let’s work on not just giving each other the benefit of the doubt but also giving each other partnership, respect, and trust.

May the hostages return immediately home. May safety, peace, and healing come to Israel and the whole Middle East more swiftly than now seems possible. 

May all of us together, and may each of us uniquely, be written and sealed in the book of life. And may we never again know a year like this one has been.

As we come together to commemorate a year since October 7th and to take the High Holiday journey together, let’s do so in the spirit of relationship — the spirit of holding fast to our individuality and to our shared community.

Alone and Together — The High Holidays in the Shadow of October 7th

It may seem odd, in reviewing a book, to begin by discussing a hypothetical different book that the authors didn’t write. But in order to illuminate and appreciate one major choice that Dr. Ron Wolfson and Dr. Jason G. Goldman made in crafting their new book on Jewish leadership, I hope you’ll indulge my oddity in doing just that.

If all I knew about a book were that its title was Jewish Communal Leadership, I might expect the book to be structured around things like:

Rules or principles for Jewish leaders to follow

Styles, personality types, or other general archetypes of Jewish leadership

Field-specific categories of Jewish professional leadership (rabbis, school principals, camp directors, JCC heads, Federation chiefs, foundation leaders, etc.)

Within these categories, I might expect that real people and real stories would be used to illustrate these rules, mistakes, styles, or positions. But the primary focus (in the hypothetical book I would expect) would be didactic, while people and stories would be roped in as secondary supports to the primary materials.

If I then learned that the subtitle was “Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners” (emphasis added), then I would feel confirmed in my suspicions. “This book,” I would think, “must be structured around lessons.” Even if I then learned that the main research process for the book was interviews with ten leaders, I would assume that stories and case studies from these interviews would fill out a book structured mainly around lessons and concepts.

But the reality of this book confounded my expectations — and in a way that may be almost as instructive as the book’s contents.

Jewish Communal Leadership: Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners is not structured around lessons. It is structured around individual leaders. Each chapter is not a principle, a rule, a style, or any other artificial construct — each chapter is a transcript of a conversation with a leader who is making an impact in the Jewish world.

Here are the ten leaders whose stories and reflections we read:

Barry Finestone [a non-voting member of Leading Edge’s board]

Daryl Messinger [board chair of Leading Edge]

It’s not that these conversations lack things like lessons, rules, principles, mistakes, styles, and information specific to various Jewish sub-fields. Each conversation is rich with both stories and conceptual insights, and my copy of the book now has many colorful book flags sticking out marking quotes and points I found valuable. Indeed, in a recent article promoting the book, Dr. Wolfson himself extracts ten generalized “takeaways” you can read right now. Still, what strikes me most about this book is that these takeaways and abstractions are never stripped of their narrative contexts. Instead, the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders, with all their messiness, take primary focus. 

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman follow in the footsteps of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) itself — another book of “lessons” that enmeshes its legal codes and linear abstractions in a much larger web of complex narratives. The result is far more demanding of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been — but also much richer and deeper in its potential for transforming the reader and the community. Discussing the Torah’s dual nature as law and story, the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l wrote:

“Law is one thing, narrative another. Narrative answers the question ‘What happened?’ Law answers the question, ‘How shall I act rightly…?’ Why then does the Torah contain both? The answer goes to the heart of the Judaic enterprise… God wants us to know, not only what to do, but why… God's law is not arbitrary. It speaks to the human condition. It arises out of human history.”

That Jewish Communal Leadership focuses on individual specific leaders’ stories, then, is one layer of wisdom in its structure. But another layer is to present not only the interview subject’s words, but the conversation between the subject and Wolfson. For fans of Wolfson’s prior work — including Relational Judaism and the Relational Judaism Handbook — it should come as no surprise that the give-and-take of two human beings encountering each other receives such a central place in this book.

In that sense, this book’s title should be read as including a knowing wink. Jewish communal leadership (the actual practice, not the book title) can’t fit into a shelf of books, let alone a single volume. It’s something living and changing, which we can only apprehend in the form of breathing, changing people. As the brilliant Dr. Erica Brown says in her chapter:

“I cannot stand to give a talk about leadership… There’s no ‘talk’ about leadership. It’s the people in the room… You are the book; you are the text.”

Books, articles, words on pages can only ever gesture in the direction of the stories, the lives, the people who make Jewish communal leadership a reality. This book is a worthy invitation into that larger and more vital encounter.

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman's new book on Jewish leadership demands more of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been. But the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders also offer richer and deeper potential for transforming the reader and the community.

Reading Edge: “You Are the Text”: Dr. Ron Wolfson’s “Jewish Communal Leadership”

Welcome to the state of VUCA, aka our new normal

In our new "VUCA" normal — a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — the pace of change has accelerated dramatically with the advent of new technologies, requiring philanthropic organizations to adapt quickly. To navigate this landscape effectively, Barry Finestone (LE board member, non-voting), President & CEO of Jim Joseph Foundation, proposes three key mindsets for crisis response: embracing "good enough" over perfection, implementing rapid decision-making systems, and fostering trust within the philanthropic community. Recognizing that VUCA is now the norm, it's crucial for the philanthropic field to collaborate, share experiences, and apply best practices from past crises to better prepare for future challenges.

JFN (podcast): Joshua Foer - Innovating Jewish Education and Storytelling

McKinsey & Company: It’s cool to be kind: The value of empathy at work

Allwork.Space: Productivity Without Burnout: How Less Work Time Can Equal More Output

HR Dive: 6 ways employers are investing in compensation and benefits

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: The Empty C-Suite: Nonprofit Executives Are Leaving to Become Consultants

HBR: How to Equitably Assign High-Profile Work

CEP: Navigating the Equity Journey at Lean Foundations

SSIR: Where Strategic Philanthropy Went Wrong

NPQ: What Would Fiduciary Duty to the Community Look Like?

This year it has been 130 years since Labor Day was first declared a federal holiday in the United States. More than just a long weekend (for some), this holiday celebrates American workers.

At Leading Edge, we have long believed in celebrating the people who are the Jewish nonprofit sector. So as we begin Labor Day weekend, we want to take this moment to acknowledge everyone who makes this remarkable sector function. And since good feedback must be specific — even positive feedback — we want to spell out what that means, and how much your work in this field means.

Since October 7th, the Jewish nonprofit sector has put its effort and expertise into overdrive. But even before this painful time, this field’s work has always been astounding. 

Jewish humanitarian organizations and their partners work to solve the most urgent and pressing problems around the world. 

Jewish human service agencies provide vital support to people struggling with poverty, isolation, unemployment, physical and mental health needs, abuse, and other issues. 

JCCs, and Jewish arts and cultural organizations bring deep religious and cultural meaning into people’s lives.

Early childhood centers, Jewish schools, camps, social engagement organizations, and campus institutions enrich the lives of children and adults, and pass on the full richness of Jewish life from generation to generation. 

Jewish federations, foundations, national umbrella organizations, and other Jewish institutions work tirelessly behind the scenes to help this ecosystem of organizations, and the community it serves, to grow and thrive.

You — the people of our sector — are what drives all this impact.

From all of us at Leading Edge to everyone who works, leads, and serves in the Jewish nonprofit sector: Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for working together with us to ensure we all support each other, grow together, and make this sector a place where every person and every organization thrives.

At Leading Edge, we have long believed in celebrating the people who are the Jewish nonprofit sector. So as we begin Labor Day weekend, we want to take this moment to acknowledge everyone who makes this remarkable sector function.

Three cheers for Jewish nonprofit workers!

Holding both: Being a universal and particular funder in a post-Oct. 7 world

The impulse to restrict our focus to Israel and Jewish causes is understandable in a hyper-polarized, post-Oct. 7 landscape, as is the pull to give in to the ideological forces that would have us recuse ourselves from the fight for a more just world, writes Lisa Eisen, co-president of Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. However, there is a dual focus in Jewish philanthropy: nurturing our own community while simultaneously working toward a better future for all. Eisen emphasizes that our job as funders and practitioners is not to unravel the sacred bonds of our tribal and prophetic responsibilities, but rather to hold and choose both.

Fast Company: Why work should make you less lonely

WorkLife: How pet bereavement policies can boost staff retention

NPQ: Restorative Compensation: Moving from Theory to Practice

HBR: 4 Experiments to Encourage Employees’ Career Progress

The Bridgespan Group: Why Gender Matters for Funders in Any Issue Area

NonProfitPRO: How to Get Your Board on Board With Fundraising

Joan Garry Consulting: The Hidden Ingredient of a High-Functioning Board

In March, Leading Edge shared our report, Jewish Nonprofit Boards: CEO Perceptions & Actions for Better Governance with the field.

CEOs overwhelmingly agree that their boards add value and feel favorably about many aspects of their boards’ performance.

From CEOs’ perspectives, many Jewish nonprofit boards could perform better around accountability, fundraising, CEO succession planning, and strategic governance.

Board chairs play a vital role and need more support.

Board culture and trust drive board effectiveness.  Jewish nonprofit boards could benefit from focusing more on building their cultures.

Jewish nonprofit board composition should be broader and more representative.

You asked us for resources to address these key learnings. These new resources are our response. 

Please share the links to these resources widely — with your board, with colleagues, with anyone else in the sector — and use them right away. Like all Leading Edge publications, they are absolutely free for you to download and print, thanks to the generosity of Leading Edge’s supporters.

We are hosting six workshops this fall specifically designed for YOU. You’ll dig into the larger concepts outlined in our guides. Board members can register for all of the workshops or choose the ones most specifically applicable to you.

The Board Workshop Series: Sessions For Board Members focus on the core components of successful board membership. These workshops are specifically designed for new board members.

The Board Workshop Series: Sessions For Board Chairs are designed for board members who are taking on executive committee or board chair responsibilities. Each session features a specific takeaway to inform your board work.

Are you the staff member stewarding and supporting your board on behalf of your organization?  We have a new virtual cohort program for you!  

The Leadership Lab: Collaborating With Your Board kicks off in November. Through our pilot program, you’ll work with fellow cohort members and experienced coaches to define an action plan for strengthening your staff-board partnership. Learn more and apply here. 

Whether you’re brand new to board service or on your 40th term, board members and board leaders can use these resources to (re-)ground their service in the fundamentals, and create a shared vocabulary with their CEOs and fellow board members.

New Guides for Board Members & Chairs and New Workshops for Boards & Professionals

Zeynep Ton, an MIT professor of business operations and co-founder/President of the Good Jobs Institute, specializes in good jobs, and in this thoroughly practical book she persuasively and robustly lays out both the why and the how. 

You can’t afford low pay. One obvious part of a good job, of course, is good pay, and Ton argues that good pay doesn’t mean pay benchmarked to the market, if the market is systematically underpaying people. “Nothing else you do will make up for low pay,” writes Ton. Good pay means pay that allows even the lowest-paid workers to be free to the kinds of worries, stressors, and vulnerabilities that harm their ability (cognitively and logistically) to do their best work.  

Furthermore, “If you are thinking, ‘But some people may not be worth $15 an hour,’ … you are not alone… But… a worker’s worth is not fixed. Ability itself is affected by low pay... The important question is not whether a particular worker is worth $15 an hour or whether a particular job is worth $15 an hour, but rather whether that person’s work — the job — has been designed to contribute $15 an hour.” 

Good jobs are about operations. But where The Case for Good Jobs most shines is in its discussions of operations. “People often see the title of my earlier book — The Good Jobs Strategy — and assume it’s an HR book,” Ton writes. “But the secret sauce of the good jobs strategy is operations.” “Invest in people” lies at the heart of Ton’s “good jobs system,” with that investment referring to compensation, benefits, and professional development as well. But “Invest in people” is flanked by “four operational choices” that make that investment pay off.

Focus and simplify. Do fewer things — only what’s most important — and your employees will be less overwhelmed and more able to focus on providing the highest value. 

Standardize and empower. Make the jobs easier and more standardized such that employees can have a fuller understanding of the big picture of the business, and then empower them to use that knowledge to make choices on their own (e.g., offering customers a discount) without constantly needing to check with management. 

Cross-train. Give employees the skills and perspectives needed both to perform well and to have a career path forward. 

Operate with slack. Smooth out work schedules, provide everyone enough (predictable) hours, and manage the flow of due dates and deliverables so that people aren’t operating at full capacity, with all the fragility full capacity entails. 

Eating the elephant. Another strength of Ton’s book, relative to many workplace-oriented works, is the level of attention she gives to the transitional phase. You can’t create a good jobs system out of a very different status quo overnight. Ton: “As one executive aptly put it, ‘How do you eat the elephant?’ Well, one bite at a time, but where you take the first bite makes a difference.”  

For example, it’s extremely risky to raise pay and expectations both sharply and instantaneously, with the pay held out as a reason for sudden changes to performance — especially not before you first address the non-pay-related reasons they’re struggling. As Ton puts it, “You can’t hang lead weights on people and then offer them a bonus for the high jump.”   

Rather, Ton explains, the best starting places are subtractions — the “focus and simplify” operational choice. Subtracting costly but low-value workflows can be more doable, when you look for opportunities, than you might think, and making jobs less overwhelming can be a high-leverage place to start a virtuous cycle that drives higher productivity toward higher revenue, higher ability to pay, better employee engagement, more employee empowerment, and off to the races. 

There is much more in this book, including plentiful examples from real businesses driving incredible results with a good jobs system, discussions of how to make the case and align the leadership and management layers of an organization, and further ideas for planning implementation. This book is an excellent resource for leaders and talent managers of nonprofits and businesses alike. 

In "The Case for Good Jobs," author Zeynep Ton champions the idea of providing good jobs with fair pay, dignity, and growth opportunities, arguing that this approach is not only ethical, but also a smart business strategy. Ton offers practical guidance on implementing a "good jobs system" and, perhaps surprisingly, suggests that "subtractions" are the ideal starting point during the transition process.

Reading Edge: The Case for Good Jobs

Report: State of the Global Workplace 2024

In its "State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report," Gallup reveals a stagnation in engagement levels and a decline in overall wellbeing, resulting in an estimated $8.9 trillion economic loss. There is a critical need for organizations to enhance workplace culture and management practices, and not just with mindfulness and wellbeing apps. 

So, what works better? According to research by Oxford University, “organisation-level initiatives such as improvements in scheduling change, management practices, staff resources or tailored job design.” In other words, changing the way people are managed at the organizational level, advocating for strategic measures to improve productivity, and employee satisfaction in an evolving work environment.

The Forward: Both/And Thinking all Around: What are we Seeing in the Field

Culture Amp: Will Four-Day Workweeks Become the Norm?

Book: Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

LifeLabs Learning: 4 Proven Steps for Building a New Manager Training Program

The Management Center: Four Guiding Principles for Managers During Unionization

HBR: Long Covid at Work: A Manager’s Guide

The Bridgespan Group: Three Pro Tips for Nonprofit Strategic Planning

HBR: 3 Lessons from The Washington Post’s Leadership Turmoil

Forbes: 20 Solutions For Navigating Nonprofit Board Member Conflicts

Report: State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know

In their latest "State of Nonprofits" report, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) presents a multifaceted analysis of the nonprofit sector's current state and future outlook. Through survey responses from hundreds of nonprofit leaders, the 2024 report illuminates critical trends, challenges, and opportunities facing organizations across the country. The findings reveal that while most nonprofits maintained balanced budgets or surpluses, concerns about staff burnout remain widespread. CEP's research also highlights the importance of funders' continued commitment to streamlined grantmaking practices and advancing racial equity. The report emphasizes the need for nonprofit leaders to adopt adaptive strategies, cultivate robust donor relationships, and prioritize staff well-being to successfully navigate the evolving landscape.


Culture Amp (report): Workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 2024 Report

Prizmah (resource): Jewish Day School Educator Pipeline Report and Playbook

WSJ: What Entry-Level Jobs Really Look Like Today

HBR: You’re Back from Your Leadership Development Program. Now What?

Fast Company: 4 strategies for promoting passion and purpose in the workplace

WorkLife: Why employers need to fine-tune their collaboration, productivity tech stacks

Jim Joseph Foundation: 13 Leaders with 13 Lessons over 13 Years

MIT SMR: How to Come Back Stronger From Organizational Trauma

I love counting the Omer. It’s weird, it’s archaic, it’s logistically unnecessary, and I relish it every year.

For the uninitiated, “counting the Omer” is a Jewish ritual of the current season. Beginning on the second night of Passover, every night we count (out loud) the days and weeks as they elapse, until we have counted 49 days, a.k.a., seven weeks. The following night, the holiday of Shavuot (celebrating the giving of the Torah) begins.

I love counting the Omer because I love small steps, incremental changes, seeding small habits, and watching them grow over time into big change. Like many people, my wife Keren and I have often used the Omer as an opportunity for self-improvement. One year, we meditated for a few minutes each day along with the Omer count. Another year, we used those seven weeks to start a “Whole 30”-style clean eating regime. Of course, that was before we had two kids under age five. Nowadays, if we manage to remember to count at all, it's usually after the kids are asleep and we've done the requisite clean up. Still, in theory if not always in practice, I appreciate counting the Omer!

As the pace of technological change accelerates, the Omer might also take on a new meaning: a beacon of insistent humanity.

For all the upheavals in the social, political, and geopolitical realms, the story of the past decade has also been shaped by enormous technological change. Newer technologies, such as AI, coupled with even more (now) familiar technologies like Zoom, Slack, and social media have been consequential. The early-2010s-style optimism about social media as a spreader of democracy has given way to widespread concerns about what various technologies are doing to our attention, and to our mental health. Both at work and at home, the rise of “dopamine culture” has led many thinkers to see that not only our work but also our minds are being changed. The pace and constant stimulation created by this technological environment can feel overwhelming for many people — including leaders (and including myself). A recent Chronicle of Philanthropy survey found that 58% of nonprofit CEOs struggle with work-life balance.

In that context, the Omer can serve as an important anchor.

The Omer is a holdover against a technology of automation. The Jewish calendar was originally a highly human affair, with no pre-planned number of days in each month. Yes, for most holidays the Torah lays out a specific day of the month on which the holidays begin, but the months themselves had no fixed starting dates; a new month only began when credible witnesses reported seeing a new moon to the court in Jerusalem. As soon as that happened, messengers rode away to carry the news of the new month to Jewish communities near and far. (The transit time for those messages account for why some holidays are just one day in Israel and two days in the Diaspora.)

Eventually, however, the calendar became “automated” — not by digital tools, but by accurate astronomical/mathematical calculations. It became possible to “fix” the future Jewish calendar not just for the coming Jewish month but the coming Jewish millennium — literally. Hebcal (an online Hebrew calendar tool) can tell you that one thousand years from now, in the Gregorian year 3024, Shavuot will fall on Sunday and Monday, June 6 and 7. The date is no less certain on the Hebrew calendar; Shavuot is the one biblical holiday for which the Torah does not explicitly specify a day of the Hebrew month on which it falls, but still, there is no uncertainty. Since it is 50 days after the beginning of Passover, Shavuot will always fall on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan. All that is to say: Technically, we don’t need to count the Omer. The future count is known. It is automated. It’s already done.

And yet, we count the Omer anyway. Stubbornly, personally, primitively — we count.

The Torah hints at why. In the verse that establishes counting the Omer (Leviticus 23:15), God commands, “Usfartem lakhem… / And you shall count for yourselves…”. We don’t count because the technical needs of Shavuot demand it. We count the Omer for ourselves. By counting, we are somehow served; we benefit.

In a world of automation, the Omer is a technology of defiant, artisanal inefficiency. And, in a world of distraction, the Omer is a technology of attention. It adds a moment of reflection and attention to the passing of each day. The days always seem to fly by; at this time of year, each day is, at least for a moment, acknowledged and (literally) accounted for.

Don’t, please, mistake my message as opposing technology. Every day I wear eyeglasses that allow me to see where my ancestors would have just bumped into things. Technology is fantastic! Innovation is good. Efficiency is marvelous. AI, like other technologies, may yet deliver us many phenomenal benefits.

But innovation and efficiency are not everything; they are not the sum or summit of goodness. And whenever we make huge changes — to our workflows and worlds, cultures and habits — we should remember to ask questions of what losses might accompany our gains. We should be curious and cautious, even as we don’t shrink from exploring new possibilities. Perhaps we should even make a point — even if just for part of the year (the Omer) or part of the week (Shabbat) — to carve out windows of non-stimulation. Perhaps we should shelter some archaic little holdovers of the analog, small islands in the rising technological stream, to remind us that these new paradigms are contingent choices and not eternal necessities.

Leadership, culture, relationships — not to mention love, trust, family, community, connection, and spirituality — these things cannot be automated. Yet they also can’t be assumed, neglected, or taken for granted. We need to tend them all, with duties and delights that the robots can’t do for us, whatever else (and it is much) they may soon do.

Painfully, this year, the count of the Omer isn’t the only count of days that the Jewish world is undertaking. The 49th day of the Omer this year will also be the 248th day since October 7th, 2023 — marking 35 weeks and three days since the brutal murder of 1,200 Israelis and the capture of hundreds of innocent hostages. We pray for the swift release of the hostages still in unimaginable captivity, for an end to the conflict, and for a sustainable peace and security for Israel, the Palestinian people, and the region.

May your Shavuot be meaningful; may our wounded world be healed; and may all of us always remember that our days inherently count.

In a world of automation, the Omer is a technology of defiant, artisanal inefficiency. And, in a world of distraction, the Omer is a technology of attention.

Unaccountable Counting: Shavuot 2024

When did you first begin to feel overwhelmed at work? Reader, your mileage may vary; it’s even possible that your answer is that you don’t, personally, feel overwhelmed at work. In which case, lucky you! But many people do feel as if their working lives are a firehose, a hamster wheel, or, at least, a bit much sometimes. 

For many of us, that sense of fatigue dates back some years — before recent geopolitical upheavals, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zoomification of many jobs, and even before the rise of smartphones and social media. Computer scientist and popular author Cal Newport argues that our pervasive sense of burnout  goes further back than that — back to the advent of email. Email made communicating easier. That sounds good, and, in many ways, it is good. But when something gets easier, we do it more. And now, well… We do it a lot.

To review Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (2021) this year, just after Newport released Slow Productivity (2024), is a little like reviewing Taylor Swift’s album Evermore (2020) even as The Tortured Poets Department (2024) only just dropped. The comparison between Cal Newport and Taylor Swift is invoked advisedly; Swift’s global community of fans may be several orders of magnitude larger than Newport’s following, but the latter (shall we call them Newporties?) might well rival the Swifties in passionate devotion. The average Cal Newport reader tends to be positively evangelistic about Newport’s ideas, which help people find not just success, but also sanity, in their work and personal lives, in a technologically complex world. Still, this reviewer (already a steadfast fan of, return reader of, and constant babbler about Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work) decided to read the 2021 Newport work before moving on to this year’s bestseller — partially just to take things in order, but also because the 2021 topic seems more squarely aligned with the interests of Leading Edge. Slow Productivity, like Deep Work, seems oriented most toward the individual, whereas A World Without Email has a lot to say about teams, team culture, and how our communication practices affect the workplace experience.

1. Beware the “hyperactive hive mind.”

If we don’t take control of our communications and admin practices, they will take control of us — subjecting us to a never-ending barrage of pings, pop-ups, and interruptions. This always-connected, constantly switching between conversations, rapid-back-and-forth style of communication has become a default environment in knowledge work, and Newport refers to it as “the hyperactive hive mind.” 

“To be fair,” writes Newport, “the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it's simple and incredibly adaptive.” And yet, “although natural,” he argues, it “has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective… This constant interaction with the hive mind… requires that you frequently switch your attention… [C]ontext switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion”.

Newport has many ideas for alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind, and he freely admits that all of them are to some degree, inconvenient, unnatural, counterintuitive, complicated, and difficult. Yet, he persuasively argues, the hyperactive hive mind, precisely by means of its ease, lulls us into accepting enormous hidden costs; achieving better mental health (along with better productivity) is a prize for which it’s well worth paying those more obvious costs in terms of convenience, time, and simplicity. “Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term,” Newport notes, “but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.”

2. Distinguish between “work” and “workflow”.

Have you ever finished a long day at work — a day full of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, email, and updating your Asana/ClickUp/Monday/Trello/Notion/calendar/bullet journal/stack of Post-its, only to feel as if you spent eight hours working, but didn’t get any honest-to-goodness work done? You may be right. You may have spent all those hours not working but managing workflow. Both of these activities are important for knowledge work jobs, but they are different tasks.

As Newport observes, the hyperactive hive mind, with its constant interruptions, will never naturally suggest that it is time to stop doing workflow and start working. Time for concentrated, high-value work (“deep work”) needs to be set aside and protected. Yet, Newport argues, workflow management isn’t mere fluff — it is the vital work of coordinating projects across teams and his point isn’t to disparage it; to the contrary, he argues that workflow management can also be done more effectively and efficiently when it is systemized and taken seriously as something worth doing well.

The biggest enemies of good work and good workflow, Newport writes, are mid-context attention switching and communication overload. Minimize these, and we’ll improve our work, our workflows, and our work experience.

3. Workflow change can’t be top-down; teams need buy-in and some measure of control.

Change — even good change — is just hard. “Imagine you want to make a major change to your own or your organization's workflow,” writes Newport. “How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can't. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.” For one person, a mindset shift can be hard enough. But to lead a mindset shift on a team is a challenge on another level. As Newport observes, “people don’t like changes they can’t control.”

Newport breaks this challenge into three steps:

Education — Help the team understand why change is needed and why the inconvenience will be worth it.

Buy-in — Generate specific ideas for new processes from discussion within the team (not by imposing them from the top down).

Adjustment — Create easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise. “In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It's the ability to make changes that matters…”

The book has far more detail, of course, than this review can capture — including nitty-gritty taskboard tactics; why office hours can be better than asynchronous messaging; why changes to your personal (non-team) workflow habits should be executed quietly, without announcement; and why phone calls are better than text messages to serve as emergency backup systems (texts could be a path to backsliding into hive-mind mode, whereas people will be hesitant to call each other unless truly needed). 

Whether you want to work with your team to improve collaboration together, or make personal changes in your workflow that help you perform better and simply breathe again, A World Without Email is worth your time.

For many of us, the sense of workplace fatigue dates back to the advent of email, which made communication easier but also more constant. "A World Without Email" is Cal Newport's exploration of how the "hyperactive hive mind" work culture, fueled by email's ascent, has led to widespread burnout, decreased productivity, and diminished mental health. Rich with practical insights, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to work more effectively and sustainably in our digital world.

Reading Edge: A World Without Email

Recently, Leading Edge convened a conversation with funders, professional leaders, board members, and other Jewish nonprofit stakeholders, about the Jewish talent pipeline. The event featured a conversation with Prof. Joshua Margolis of Harvard Business School, facilitated by Leading Edge’s board member Rachel Kay (Senior Vice President & Chief People Officer, Hearst). We’re pleased to present this video recording, as well as a summary of a few insights below.

Among much else, here are four insights from this conversation that particularly struck us:

1. Affordability matters for professionals, too. 

Stakeholders in the Jewish community are often, and understandably, concerned about the affordability of Jewish experience for community members. But Prof. Margolis reminds us that we’re not concerned enough about the affordability of supplying those Jewish experiences — i.e., the affordability of working in this field. Jewish nonprofit employees need the compensation — as well as prestige and respect — to make the field attractive to the community’s highest-level talent.

2. An organization isn’t one thing, it’s three. 

A practical instrument for doing something (achieving a nonprofit’s mission; selling a product for a business; etc.)

An investment vehicle — An organization is a vehicle (sometimes) for investing funds, and (always) for investing commitment, effort, trust, time, etc.

A venue of human living — An organization is a place where professionals, board members, constituents, and community members come together and relate to one another, a place where people spend time and live their lives. That function matters in ways that go beyond the instrumental and investment natures of the organization.

One challenge of leadership is that leaders need to lead the organization in all three of these modes at once, even as different stakeholders often don't agree how to prioritize them.

3. We need to do more to develop people who develop other people. 

In our field, we do a lot to develop people who do the primary work of the organizations, but we need to do more to develop the people managers who are developing others. Sometimes professional development means external training, but most mentorship and professional development happens on the job.

4. Doing R&D means real comfort with failure. 

Organizations and funders often say they want experimentation and R&D. But often, they want experiments in name only. They want experiments, but only the ones that work. People also say they want to make “big bets,” but often they want their big bets to always succeed. What we need is more experiments that actually test hypotheses on a small scale, and we need to be willing to let the experiments succeed in teaching us, potentially by showing us that the hypothesis is a failure. Corning Glass has an annual celebration (with cake) to celebrate their failures; that’s a mindset toward experimentation that the Jewish community could use more of.

We’re grateful to Prof. Margolis, Rachel Kay, and everyone who joined us for the conversation.

Recently, Leading Edge convened a conversation with funders, professional leaders, board members, and other Jewish nonprofit stakeholders, about the Jewish talent pipeline. The event featured a conversation with Prof. Joshua Margolis of Harvard Business School, facilitated by Leading Edge’s board member Rachel Kay (Senior Vice President & Chief People Officer, Hearst).

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