We will be growing the Better Angels Library of learning materials over time, starting with the titles listed below. All of these titles were used as texts within the Leadership Studies Program at Ripon College, so they come highly recommended for aspiring leaders.
Steven Pinker
The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Stephen Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Martin Seligman
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
Peter Senge
Robert Wright
The initial inspiration for Our Better Angels, the Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014, showed up all over the place – in social media, on television, and in our neighborhoods. Thousands of people dumped buckets of ice on their own heads and raised many millions of dollars to combat ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Our Better Angels (OBA) is a nonprofit community devoted to leadership education and philanthropy. An initiative of the Wisconsin Leadership Institute (WLI), the Better Angels Community galvanizes what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” and helps to spread the contagion of honesty, courage, compassion, continuous learning, and community service.
In his 2000 widely influential study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam studied social capital – resources that build and support positive social interactions within a community. He compared two kinds of social capital: bonding and bridging.
