Meeting challenges and resolving conflicts are things that can be done by anyone with the passion to do so, according to John Graham. And he should know. A veteran conflict mediator, Graham heads the Giraffe Heroes Project, whose extensive workshops have helped communities, cities, organizations, and individuals deal with challenge and change. Stick Your Neck Out is based on those experiences. The book details the skills, qualities, and strategies required to make a difference, with profiles of problem-solvers and activists from doctors to waitresses, who have all acted like giraffes and "stuck their necks out" to address issues like poverty, gang violence, and pollution. Graham's concepts and coaching tips, from communicating with sensitivity to more urgent actions like filing complaints and protesting, apply equally well to macro and micro issues, all the way down to interfamily squabbles and work conflicts. Graham's "giraffes" have tested his ideas in the real-life situations recounted here, and shown that they work.
I shipped out on a freighter when I was sixteen, took part in the first ascent of Mt. McKinley's North Wall at twenty, and hitchhiked around the world at twenty-two. A Foreign Service Officer for fifteen years, I was in the middle of the revolution in Libya and the war in Vietnam. For three years in the mid-seventies, I was a member of NATO's top-secret Nuclear Planning Group, then served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn. As an assistant to Ambassador Andrew Young at the United Nations, I was deeply involved in U.S. initiatives in Southern Africa, South Asia and Cuba.
By most measures, I was very successful. But something was missing.
In 1980, a close brush with death aboard a burning cruise ship in the North Pacific forced me to a deeper search for meaning in my life. Now out of the Foreign Service, I began teaching better ways of handling challenge and conflict. Since 1983 I've been a leader of the Giraffe Heroes Project, an international organization moving people to stick their necks out for the common good. The Project finds ordinary people acting with extraordinary courage on a broad range of important issues, then tells their stories to millions of others through the media, and in schools.
I'm a familiar keynote speaker on themes of leadership, courage, meaning and service. I also leads Giraffe Heroes Project workshops, helping organizations, businesses and individuals handle their challenges more effectively.I've done TV and radio all over the world and articles about me have appeared in major magazines and newspapers.
I'm the author of Outdoor Leadership, It's Up to Us (a mentoring book for teens), Stick Your Neck Out--A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond, and Sit Down Young Stranger, my new memoir (www.sitdownyoungstranger.com>.
I'm active today as an international peacemaker, focusing on the Middle East and Africa. I have a degree in geology from Harvard and one in engineering from Stanford, neither of which I ever expect to use.
