Category: Books
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Organizational and operational features of healthy living systems
Here is a list of organizational and operational features of healthy living systems from Elisabet Sahtouris’ book EarthDance, page 369: Self-creation (autopoiesis) Self-reflexivity (autognosis—self-knowledge) Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics) Response ability—to internal and external stress or change Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy) Input/output of matter/energy/information from/to other holons Transformation of matter/energy/information Communications among all…
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Book Review: Mind and Heart
Mind and Heart – Mapping Your Personal Journey Towards Leadership For Sustainability by Petra Kuenkel is a book which shows how we can use our life and leadership experiences to make more meaningful contributions to the world. Petra invites us to review our own leadership journeys in the light of other people’s experiences. She offers…
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Book Review: Culture Shock
Culture Shock: A Handbook For 21st Century Business by Will McInnes is a brilliant title on a book which is about the culture shock of moving from the traditional autocratic way of doing business to a democratic approach where there is true participation, openness, fairness, and connectedness. The perspective of Culture Shock is that an…
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Seeing Life in Work
Simon Robinson is co-author of Holonomics, Customer Experiences with Soul, and Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation. Simon invited me to write a guest blog post for Transition of Consciousness. I wrote about Seeing Life in Work. Update 2022-09-18: Text updated and converted to blocks.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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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’…