Her signature reads: Monica Sharma, Director, Leadership and Capacity Development, United Nations.  Heavy duty. :)   Trained as a medical doctor and epidemiologist, she's been working with the UN since1988, designing large-scale programs of child survival and maternal health, particularly in Africa.  Her work is documented to touch 4.5 million lives directly and some 130 million people indirectly.   Ok, so maybe that's where she gets her title. :)

Today when we spoke, though, I got all her unofficial titles -- family from West Bengal, met J. Krishnamurti at the age of 6, visisted Dalai Lama at the age of 7, sat a 10-day course with S. N. Goenka whom she knows personally, visits Nepal for a meditation retreat every year with a Tibetan teacher. :)

Last December, we actually had breakfast together in Puerto Rico, where she spoke about her most recent quest -- how can we empower grassroot leadership?  And Diana, Paul's wife, reconnected us again.

What's interesting about Monica is the juxtaposition of the big, quantifiable world of the UN and the small, anecdotal work of the human spirit.  She gets them both and wants to create bottom-up movement that addresses immediate, systemic and underlying causes of societal inequities.  Ultimately, she wants to support "wisdom-sourced action".  What she also appreciates is the power of gift-economy and how it can't be bought by the dominant corporate paradigm.  And as you might guess, that's why we're opening up a few  dialogues to see what emerges.

Monica's thought through this stuff in some serious detail.  Her leadership framework combines the integral work of Ken Wilber, emotional intellegance work of Daniel Goleman, and process work of Likert-Emberling.  Here's the full out chart: