Category: Reviews

Tom Morris asks in his book If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soulf of Business what Aristotle would have done to “create lasting excellence and long-term success in the business world” (p.ix)? Tom Morris believes that “there are some basic truths … which undergird any sort of human excellence or flourishing” (p.x). “Regardless of…

Pathways to Possibility: Transforming Our Relationship with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World is written by Rosamund Stone Zander, who has “dedicated the last fifteen years” to understanding “human growth and expansion” (p.xiv). The book teaches its readers to distinguish between two broad approaches to life: the “downward spiral” and “radiating possibility” (p.xv). Two ways…

A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives is written by Kelly Brogan,1 who is a psychiatrist. It’s a book focusing on women’s health, but what Brogan writes about depression and food is applicable to men as well. Brogan is a pragmatist, natural…

Future sense: Five Explorations of Whole Intelligence for a World That’s Waking Up is a book where Malcolm Parlett wrote what was inside of him to write. He throws “light on … the usual thinking of society and the assumptions people live by” (p.1). The book is “a stimulant to thinking differently” (p.8). Parlett’s aim…

Flourishing Enterprise: The New Spirit of Business by Chris Laszlo and Judy Sorum Brown, with John R. Ehrenfeld, Mary Gorham, Ilma Barros-Pose, Linda Robson, Roger Saillant, Dave Sherman, and Paul Werder, introduces the notion of flourishing. The Foreword is written by Peter Senge. There is also an Afterword written by David Cooperrider. The last chapter…

Essays on Life Itself by Robert Rosen is a collection of essays that were mainly written after Robert Rosen’s other book Life Itself was published. Robert Rosen (1934—1998) was an American theoretical biologist. His research was concerned with the most fundamental aspects of biology, specifically questions about life itself. Basic questions Robert Rosen’s main curiosity…

Future Fit by Giles Hutchins is “not a ‘cook-book’ offering a prescriptive methodology,” but “an exploration into unchartered waters” (p.28). The most important challenge, according to Giles Hutchins, is “our ability to embrace a deep and fundamental shift in logic — how we think, perceive and relate” (p.12). “We need to get radical and deal…

The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems by Christopher Alexander with HansJoachim Neis and Maggie Moore Alexander describes the building of the Eishin Gauken Campus in Japan. One of the “main purposes” of the book is “to demonstrate that the physical-ecological and the mental-emotional-social cannot be separated”…

Organize for Complexity: How to get life back into work to build the high-performance organization by Niels Pflaeging is a small book on work and complexity. The book is intended to be a “textbook for thinking about organizations,” a “source of inspiration,” a “dictionary,” and a “workbook” (p.x). Niels Pflaeging argues that “we must create…

The OpenSpace Agility Handbook by Daniel Mezick, Deborah Pontes, Harold Shinsato, Louise Kold-Taylor, and Mark Sheffield contains several components, each of which are described in the handbook. The purpose of the handbook is to serve as a reference and guide for those interested in Agile adoptions. A “Big Picture” is available on the OpenSpace Agility web…