The Textbook I Could Not Find: Announcing The Alchemy of Leadership

A forthcoming academic textbook on leadership development, tentatively titled The Alchemy of Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Executive Transformation, is currently in preparation. It is the work I could not find when I needed it, which is most of what produced the decision to write it.

The gap the book addresses

The existing literature on senior leadership development splits reliably into two categories, neither of which is adequate for the specific work the field now requires.

The first category is popular leadership books — the memoir-led, framework-driven, trade-published works that dominate airport bookshops and executive reading lists. These books have their uses. They are, by design, accessible; their insights travel well in conversation; they usually carry the credibility of their authors’ operating experience. They are also, with rare exceptions, theoretically thin. They present frameworks without interrogating them, anecdotes without methodology, claims without evidence. The reader finishes them with a specific vocabulary for what they already intuited, and not much else.

The second category is clinical psychology texts — the serious academic works on depth psychology, archetypal theory, somatic practice, trauma integration, and the other substantive traditions that underpin real developmental work. These works are rigorous. They carry genuine intellectual weight. They are also, almost without exception, written for clinicians. The register does not translate to senior leaders or to the specific conditions of senior organisational work. The material is true and structurally unavailable to the audience that would most benefit from it.

What does not currently exist, in any textbook I have been able to find, is a work that integrates both — that brings the clinical rigour of depth psychology into direct engagement with the specific realities of senior leadership, at the register senior leaders and HR practitioners can actually use, with the theoretical architecture that holds the claims accountable to the underlying traditions they come from.

That is the gap. It has been obvious to me for at least a decade. It has, evidently, been obvious to many practitioners, because the absence of this work is a standing conversation at every senior leadership development convening I attend.

What the forthcoming book is

The manuscript is approximately 130,000 words. Twenty chapters, plus front matter, a conclusion, three appendices, and a consolidated bibliography of the field literature. Written in a register that sits between academic textbook and practitioner guide — theoretically rigorous, but accessible to senior leaders and HR practitioners without a psychology background.

The structure follows the five-element developmental sequence I have written about across this feed: FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR, AETHER. Each element is treated as a developmental stage with its own specific practices, integrated with the archetypal framework (Sovereign, Magician, Coach, Oracle) that runs through the whole.

The book draws on multiple source traditions. Depth psychology (Jung and the post-Jungian tradition, Hillman, Moore, Gillette, Corlett, Pearson). Somatic practice (the relevant sections of the trauma integration literature, where directly applicable to executive practice). Archetypal theory, organisational shadow work, and systems-level developmental thinking. The references are substantive. The argument is built on the traditions, not in isolation from them.

What the book is not: a memoir, a case collection, or a list of frameworks. It is an integrated developmental framework, stated with the rigour the subject requires, addressed to practitioners and senior leaders who will use it.

Who the book is for

Three primary audiences.

Senior HR and talent development leaders who are responsible for executive development investment in their organisations and have concluded that conventional programmes are producing insufficient structural change. The book provides a theoretically grounded alternative to the frameworks that have been commissioned without producing the results they promised.

Executive coaches and leadership practitioners who are already working at depth and want the full theoretical architecture that their practice has been implicitly drawing on. The book formalises what serious practitioners have usually learned through long apprenticeship, in a form that can be referenced, taught, and extended.

Senior leaders doing their own developmental work who want the framework they are working within to be theoretically honest. The book is not a self-help text, but it is accessible enough to be genuinely useful to the leader who is engaging seriously with their own development and wants the substantive architecture behind the work.

Secondary audiences include graduate students in leadership development and organisational psychology, consultants working at the intersection of strategy and leadership, and the small community of practitioners already working with depth-based approaches who want the theoretical consolidation of what the field has built.

Current status and what to expect

The manuscript is complete. It is currently in preparation for submission to publishers. Given the scale of the work, the specific academic positioning, and the characteristics of the publishing process for works of this kind, the path from manuscript to published book is inherently long — with, necessarily, significant uncertainty about timeline.

I will not be setting public launch dates in advance. Too many factors — publisher conversations, peer review, editorial cycles — are outside my control, and committing to a visible timeline when the process itself is iterative would be irresponsible to readers who might plan around it. The book will be announced when it is genuinely available, and not before.

What I will do, in the meantime, is share periodic updates on the work of the book itself — specific arguments it makes, specific traditions it engages with, specific questions the framework is addressing. The Alchemy of Leadership Substack will be the primary venue for this. Readers interested in following the work will find substantive preview material there over the months ahead.

What the programme is, meanwhile

The Alchemy of Leadership cohort programme is the practical expression of the framework the book formalises. The programme is already running; the Spring 2026 cohort completes in April, and the Fall 2026 cohort begins in October. Readers interested in the developmental work itself, rather than in the textbook that formalises it, will find the programme is where the work actually happens.

The book, when it arrives, will be the textbook that describes the work. The cohort is where the work is done. Both have their place. Neither substitutes for the other.

Announcements concerning the book’s progress will appear here periodically. Thank you for the readers whose engagement with the series over these months has, among other things, helped confirm that the gap the book addresses is as widely felt as I suspected it was.