Jan Höglund's Blog

Category: Books

  • It matters what we do and how we think

    I have recently started to read Mind and Heart by Petra Kuenkel. This is a truly amazing book which is about our personal leadership journeys. Here is a short introduction video. I will come back with a book review.  

  • Basic desires that motivate our actions

    Steven Reiss explains in Who am I?: The 16 Basic Desires That Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personality how the following 16 basic desires shape and guide nearly all human behavior: Acceptance, the need for approval Curiosity, the need to learn Eating, the need for food Family, the need to raise children Honor, the…

  • The living organization

    I have raised the view in a previous blog post that an organization is more like an organism than a machine. Now, I’m reading The Living Company: Growth Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie de Geus. The question at the heart of the book is: What if we think about a company as a…

  • Domination Structures

    I have recently read Speak Peace in a World of Conflict: What You Say Next Will Change Your World by Marshall Rosenberg. Marschall defines a domination system as a system in which a few people control many people to their own advantage. In domination systems people are trained to think in ways that support the…

  • Safe space

    Daniel Mezick emphasizes the importance of psychological safe space in his book The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager. I find this very interesting and think that Daniel is right when he writes on that: “This psychological safety is one of (if not THE) most important aspects of developing a Learning Organization.” (p. 55)…

  • Henri Bortoft

    I have recently read two of Henri Bortoft’s books, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science and Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. I am particularly fascinated by the dynamic way of seeing which is explained at length by Henri Bortoft. It’s important to take the ‘appearance’…

  • Balanspunkten

    Boken Theory U av Otto Scharmer handlar om hur man med öppet sinne, hjärta och vilja kan leda från framtiden så som den växer fram. Det som slår mig är att detta ytterst handlar om var man har sin balanspunkt,som individ och som team. Teamets balanspunkt är beroende av var teammedlemmarna har sina. Det slår…

  • The Source

    My search for better ways of working has now led me to Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation. It’s a truly amazing book by Joseph Jaworski.

  • The ‘totalitarian’ tendency of systems theory

    I have written in a previous post that systems thinking makes me uneasy. It’s treating organizations as machines, and people as machine parts, which I criticize. This is why I’m searching for better ways of working. I find Henri Bortoft’s view very interesting. He writes that: “Systems thinking is often presented as a revolution in…

  • Organizational metamorphosis

    Goethe’s Way of Science makes it possible to see the continuous form and metamorphosis of the growing plant. What I’m wondering about is whether organizations are like plants? If so, this has profound implications on how we see and think about organizations. Henri Bortoft writes in The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science (page…