Somali-American Presidential Appointee & Tech Entrepreneur Hamse Warfa Announces Groundbreaking Book on Transformational Leadership
June 11, 2024
Minneapolis, MN
The seasoned global leader from Minnesota offers a new model of leadership with 12 practices for driving lasting change.
From child refugee to U.S. presidential appointee with over 25 years of global leadership experience in federal and state governments, philanthropic organizations, nonprofits, and in the private sector, Hamse Warfa’s life and career has navigated some astonishing twists and turns. Now, he has developed a leadership framework to help guide and nurture the next generation of leaders to be purposeful, inclusive and innovative with the ambitious goal of impacting 1 million leaders within a decade.
Warfa was appointed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as Minnesota Department of Employment & Economic Development’s (DEED) Deputy Commissioner in 2019. At that time, Warfa was the highest ranking Somali American official in the executive branch of state government. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz says of Warfa's leadership: “Hamse Warfa leads with integrity and passion – whether he’s serving the people of Minnesota or working with the President to improve the lives of people across the country. Hamse offers invaluable insight about the journey to becoming a great leader. I’m proud to call him an advisor and a friend.”
In January of 2022, Warfa left his position with the Walz administration when he was appointed by President Biden as his senior advisor in the U.S. State Department to advance the president’s democracy agenda at home and abroad including the 2023 Summit on Democracy supported by 74 nations. After receiving a State Department 2023 Meritorious Honor Award for innovation and advancing equity, Warfa recently took a leave from government service to focus on efforts to build a functioning and thriving society through leadership principles and practices he learned during his time in government and across sectors. Warfa’s mission is to inspire a more prosperous world by guiding leaders to translate intangible organizational and societal challenges into tangible solutions. “My goal is to support and work with leaders who are committed to transforming our existing democratic and economic systems to achieve a more equitable and prosperous world,” Warfa explains.
Warfa's leadership in action has already gained praise from renowned leaders across multiple sectors. Harvard Business School professor Jan Rivkin explains, “Hamse Warfa is a rare individual who has led successfully in the private, public, and social sectors. He knows how to bring people together across sectors to tackle problems too tough for any one sector to solve on its own.”
Warfa’s forthcoming book The Transformational Leader: Twelve Practices for Driving Lasting Change will be published by Wise Ink Media in Fall 2024. In the pages of The Transformational Leader, Warfa shares his lived experiences as a child refugee, senior leader in government, business and nonprofit founder, executive and global thought leader. He calls on leadership principles to help readers learn from peace-building, democratic participation and the practice of vulnerability. The book focuses on actionable ways leaders can engage in the democratic process and shares inspiration that can be used by families, neighborhoods and communities. The book is a call to activate emerging and current leaders to focus on building safe, dynamic and inclusive teams that are equipped to achieve asset-based innovation for greater impact.
Dr. Rivken continues about Warfa, "All of us can learn from the leadership lessons in his book—a distillation of the wisdom Warfa has gained in his remarkable journey from refugee to White House appointee.”
Warfa has set the ambitious goal of creating a movement that impacts 1 million transformational leaders within a decade. The release of this book is one of the most important steps toward creating this movement, but he plans to follow up with additional innovative strategies and activities to bring more leaders on board. These include partnerships, transformational leadership training, retreats, educational curriculum and a documentary that inspires action to create welcoming communities. Undertaking this task entirely on his own highlights the depth of commitment he feels to ensuring transformational leadership takes root across the globe.
"I am blessed by the fact that my leadership experience has allowed me to create this leadership framework to positively impact society," says Warfa, "and if you also want to meaningfully tackle today’s organizational and societal challenges with transformational leadership practices that serve the greater good, this leadership model and book is for you."
The Transformational Leader will be available in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. Please sign up to Hamse’s leadership newsletter at Hamsewarfa.com for additional information about pre-orders of the book.
About Hamse Warfa:
From child refugee to U.S. presidential appointee, Hamse Warfa’s life and career has navigated some astonishing twists and turns. A passionate leader, he has more than 25 years of global experience across federal and state governments, philanthropic organizations, nonprofits, and in the private sector as a successful tech entrepreneur. Warfa’s mission is to inspire a more prosperous world by encouraging leaders to translate intangible organizational and societal challenges into tangible solutions and impact. He accomplishes this by providing leadership strategy, training, and innovative leadership technology tools designed to accelerate impact.
In January 2022, the U.S. President appointed Warfa as his senior advisor to the U.S. State Department to advance a global democracy agenda including the 2023 Summit on Democracy supported by 74 nations. Warfa received a State Department 2023 Meritorious Honor Award for innovation and advancing equity. Prior to joining the federal government, Warfa was the Deputy Commissioner for Workforce Development at the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) in Minnesota. Appointed by Governor Tim Walz in April 2019, Deputy Commissioner Warfa served as the highest ranking African immigrant official in the Minnesota executive branch of government. In this position, he oversaw Minnesota State’s Employment and Training programs, the Office of Economic Opportunity, Minnesota’s 51 job centers, the Governor’s Workforce Development Board, and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.
In addition to his public sector work, Warfa is an innovative and successful serial entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder and the executive vice president at BanQu Inc., a software company selected for an Innovation Award by the Obama Administration and by MIT. He also founded Tayo Consulting Group, which helps philanthropic clients refine their goals and identify program activities to fund. Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Warfa worked in philanthropy as a senior program officer at the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, leading the foundation’s domestic and international Children & Families grantmaking programs. Warfa holds a Masters in Organizational Management and Leadership from Springfield College in Massachusetts, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from San Diego University. He also completed executive education at Harvard Business School as part of the Young American Leaders Program. He is a 2016 Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow, a recipient of the 2017 Minnesota Statewide Facing Race Award, and an Ashoka Global Fellow for his social entrepreneurship work.
In addition to his new book, The Transformational Leader: Twelve Practices for Driving Lasting Change, Warfa is the author of “America Here I Come: A Somali Refugee’s Quest for Hope,” and the producer of an upcoming documentary film.
About Wise Ink Media:
Wise Ink Media was founded in 2013 by Dara Beevas and Amy Quale. Wise Ink is a creative publishing agency for game-changers, thought leaders, storytellers, and movement makers. Their authors uplift, inspire and inform, and their titles support building a better and more equitable world. For more information, visit wiseink.com.
For further information, contact:
Hamse Omar, Media Relations Manager
Hamse@Hamsewarfa.com