The works behind every gslk tool.
gslk is not a collection of advice. Every feature implements a specific, named work — with an author, a date and a source. The library runs from Sun Tzu and Xenophon to Ostrom and Edmondson, and every page ends the same way: what your club can do this week.
The honesty rule: where a model is contested, widely taught but weakly evidenced, or its instrument is commercially licensed, each page says so plainly. No claim here is stronger than its source allows, and every page states whether its primary source is in the public domain.
Every work grounds one or more of the ten gslk competency domains. Pick a domain to see who wrote about it — from antiquity to this century.
Leadership and character
Leading begins with a person who can first run themselves. The Stoics, Sun Tzu and modern behavioural models — on what a leader DOES rather than what a leader is.
Kouzes & Posner: the Five Practices
Leadership described as behaviour rather than a trait — which is why the AI coach can ask instead of tell.
Sun Tzu: know yourself and the other
Preparation decides the battle: whoever knows both themselves and the other in advance usually does not have to fight at all.
Marcus Aurelius: what is in your power
He ran an empire and still had to talk himself out of bed each morning. He kept the notes only for himself — so not one sentence in them is there to impress anybody.
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Epictetus: the dichotomy of control
A former slave who became a teacher. His claim: events do nothing by themselves — what you think about them does.
Seneca: time is the only real resource
You can get more money and more people. You cannot get more time, and it is the one thing nobody plans.
Plutarch: character is revealed by deeds
A small thing done with nobody watching says more about a person than a battle won.
How an organisation is built
How a group of people becomes an institution that runs without its founder: span of control, functions, rules, the authority a subordinate grants, and handover to the next generation.
Graičiūnas on span of control
The formula showing that a manager's relationships grow faster than their team — and when that becomes a problem.
The Graičiūnas formula in practice
"Everything routes through me, I answer forty messages a night, and when I am ill nothing moves." That is not a character flaw. That is the formula, felt long before anyone counts it.
Succession: a relay, not a horse race
A planned, overlapping handover instead of a contest whose loser walks away with the knowledge.
8 more in this branch
Aristotle's Politics: community, the common good, and the limit money does not have
Why a person only fully develops inside a community — and why the things everyone owns get the least care.
Confucius' Analects: transmit rather than reinvent
A leader who breaks his own rule announces, that same day, that here there are no rules.
Polybius' mixed constitution: why good organisations decay with nobody to blame
The first generation earns its authority; the second is born holding it. The wheel starts turning down at the second.
Fayol on the functions and principles of management
The first written list of what a manager actually does — and it is still repeated as if it were a law.
Weber on legitimate authority and bureaucracy
Rules and offices outlive even the most compelling founder. Weber thought that was both progress and a cage.
Barnard: the authority a subordinate grants
An instruction has force only if the person it is addressed to accepts it. In a volunteer club you see that every week.
Mintzberg: what managers actually do
When somebody sat beside real managers and wrote everything down, it turned out they barely plan — they talk, switch and firefight.
Katz: the three skills of an administrator
Three skills — technical, people, big picture — and the mix changes as you rise.
Strategy and choice
Seeing the situation as it actually is, and choosing what you will NOT do. From Machiavelli and Clausewitz to Porter and Rumelt.
The Prince: power as it actually is
Not a handbook of cynicism but a demand to look honestly: first see who actually holds power, only then decide what to do.
Clausewitz: friction, uncertainty, and a purpose set from outside
The gap between the plan and the execution is made by friction — the small things no plan ever counts. And no means can state its own purpose: that is always set from outside it.
Porter's five forces and the choice of position
Five forces shape profitability, and rivals are only one of them. Strategy begins when you choose what you will NOT be.
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Mintzberg: a plan is not a strategy
Most strategy forms while you act, and only afterwards does somebody write it down. A written plan does not mean a strategy exists.
Rumelt: the kernel, and the signs of bad strategy
Strategy is not a list of goals. It has three parts: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action. Without a diagnosis, it is a wish list.
Brand and value
What someone thinks of you when you are not in the room — and how that is grown on a zero budget. It is the same model this platform's own research measures.
Brand Equity: The Five Assets
There is no money for advertising, yet a club already owns all five brand assets and bought none of them. Aaker names them, and a named thing is something you can actually protect.
Customer-Based Brand Equity
Brand equity is the difference made by what a person already knows about you. That knowledge has two components: awareness and image.
University Brand Equity: Core and Supporting
Emotional environment is one of the core dimensions of a university's brand. That is exactly where a student club works.
2 more in this branch
Service Branding: The Experience Is the Brand
With goods, the product is the primary brand. With services the company is the brand — and so is what the person actually went through.
Marketing Myopia
The railroads decided they were in the railroad business. While they thought that, their passengers moved to cars and planes.
The economics of an organisation
Where the money comes from and where it goes; why organisations exist at all; and how a community governs what belongs to everyone.
Xenophon's Oeconomicus — the text the word "economics" comes from
Running an estate as a leadership virtue: order that others can find, and a steward you must train yourself.
Coase: why organisations exist at all
If the market allocates everything efficiently, why do people form organisations at all instead of buying every job from outside?
Ostrom: shared resources a community governs itself
Shared things do not have to be destroyed. Ostrom found eight conditions under which a community keeps its own resources alive for centuries — with no privatisation and no boss.
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Williamson: which governance fits which transaction
Coase said organisations exist because of transaction costs. Williamson said how to choose: buy on the market, sign a long relationship, or do it yourself.
Drucker: management by objectives, and what an organisation is for
The purpose of an organisation always lies outside it — so doing the internal work well proves nothing by itself.
Osterwalder and Pigneur: the Business Model Canvas
Nine boxes on a single sheet showing how an organisation creates value, how it delivers it, and what it lives on.
Club money, legally: who may sign, and whose money is it
A club that is not a legal person cannot hold an account or sign a contract. Three routes follow from that, and only one of them is founding an association.
A club budget with no legal entity: planning, records, reporting, handover
A budget is an agreement: who may spend, up to how much, and who they show it to afterwards. In-kind support is budget too, and nobody counts it.
Finding sponsors: parama (charitable support), paid sponsorship, and reporting back afterwards
Parama — charitable support, with nothing given in return — paid sponsorship, and support in kind are three different things in Lithuanian law, and a club calls all three by one word. The difference decides who signs and whether an invoice is needed.
Impact and responsibility
Who besides your own club is better off — and to whom the organisation answers. From Cicero on duty to stakeholders and sustainability.
The Social Change Model — the Seven C's
Leadership as a purposeful, collaborative, values-based process leading to social change — no title required.
Cicero's De Officiis: the useful and the honourable cannot stay apart for long
A book on duty from the Republic's last years — and on why staying silent already counts as deceit.
Freeman and the stakeholder approach
An organisation answers to everyone it affects and everyone who affects it. Owners are only one of those groups.
2 more in this branch
Carroll’s pyramid of responsibility
Four responsibilities — economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic. When the money runs out, the other three run out with it.
Elkington’s triple bottom line
People, planet, profit. And a rare thing in the literature: 25 years on, the author publicly recalled his own concept.
Speaking, writing, negotiating
An unspoken idea moves nothing. The canons of rhetoric, the rules of conversation, and negotiation that asks “why do you need that?” instead of arguing over positions.
Aristotle's Rhetoric: ethos, pathos, logos
Persuasion begins with who is sitting in the room. What you want to say comes second.
Cicero's De Oratore: the five canons
First have something worth saying. Only then worry about how you will say it.
Quintilian: the good man skilled in speaking
Eloquence cannot be separated from character: character is grown over years, a speech is prepared in an evening.
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Grice's conversational maxims
What you chose to leave out is heard just as clearly as what you said.
Fisher and Ury: negotiating by interests
An argument over positions has no end. The question "why do you need that?" has one.
Learning and teams
How people and teams actually learn, what gets in the way, and why points sometimes reduce the very willingness they are meant to reward.
Open Badges — portable, verifiable credentials
An open standard that turns a skill into a data object which travels with the person instead of staying in a club's spreadsheet.
Kolb's experiential learning cycle
Experience → reflection → conceptualisation → new action. A question structure for project debriefs, not a learning-style test.
Tuckman's stages of team development
Forming, storming, norming, performing — a shared vocabulary for friction. Not a diagnosis and not a score.
3 more in this branch
Bandura's self-efficacy
Belief in your capability to do a specific thing. Its strongest source is a difficulty actually overcome, not encouragement.
Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory
Autonomy, competence, relatedness. Plus the warning this platform needs most: points can reduce the very willingness they reward.
Edmondson on psychological safety
A shared belief that it is safe to say the awkward thing. Not comfort — the condition for learning.
The same work written for a member: what to do with it in the club.