Category: Reviews
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Book Review: Organize for Complexity
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…
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Book Review: The OpenSpace Agility Handbook
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…
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Book Review: Everything Is Workable
Everything Is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution by Diane Musho Hamilton is, as the subtitle says, a book on conflict resolution combined with meditation practice. Diane Musho Hamilton is an experienced mediator and meditator, and has much experience to share. Here is a summary of the book together with some conclusions. Conflict Conflict…
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Book Review: The Systems View of Life
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi is an interdisciplinary book which presents ”a unified systemic vision that includes and integrates life’s” different dimensions (p.xii). All living systems are ”highly nonlinear” networks where there are ”countless interconnections” (p.xii). Here is a summary of the book together with…
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Book Review: Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order
Paavo Pylkkänen’s aim with Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order is to explore David Bohm’s ideas on mind, matter, time, and conscious experience.1 Pylkkänen was a collaborator with Bohm and has for many years had the intuition that quantum theory is relevant to the understanding of consciousness.2 This has led him to more carefully consider…
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Book Review: Thrivability
Thrivability by Jean M. Russell is a book which “pulls us to work (and play) together in ways generate new possibilities.” Thrivability is “the ability for you and me to thrive, for what is around us to thrive, and for thriving to be the sum of all we do” (p. 2). Thrivability emerges from “holding…
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Book Review: A Process Theory of Organization
A Process Theory of Organization by Tor Hernes makes an attempt to connect the fluidity of day-to-day organizational life with its structures. What Hernes mean with organizational life is “the ongoing process of making, remaking, unmaking and relating of organizational actors of all sorts … into meaningful wholes.” A meaningful whole can be “a Twitter…
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Book Review: Science, Order, and Creativity
Science, Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat is an amazing book! One of the main purposes of the book is to “draw attention to the key importance of liberating creativity” (p. 271). The book has really deepened my understanding and appreciation of creativity and its relation to order. It has also…
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Book Review: The Age of Thrivability
The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World by Michelle Holliday is a new book which will be released this fall. Michelle Holliday is a facilitator, consultant, researcher, presenter, and writer. Her work centers around “thrivability,” which is based on a view of organizations and communities as living systems. It’s this view…
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Book Review: Infinite Potential
Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm is a well-written book by F. David Peat. David Bohm was a unique and very creative person who had an exceptional mind. He was able to pursue abstract thought to a far greater degree than most other people. But it’s difficult to live in high abstraction…