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.
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.
Confucius' Analects: transmit rather than reinvent
A leader who breaks his own rule announces, that same day, that here there are no rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same work written for a member: what to do with it in the club.