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This blog discusses books on the general topics of innovation, creativity, leadership and strategy. You are encouraged to comment and to post new book reviews. To submit new reviews, you must register with Blogger and create a profile. If you do not want to join, send book reviews to me via e-mail. Please indicate how you want the review attributed. I encourage you to write reviews of the older books as well as new ones.
The Book of Chakra Healing, Liz Simpson, Sterling Publishing Co., 1999, 243 p
This is a good reference book and a good first book to read. The book is illustrated wonderfully in color throughout. And, in a small book is very comprehensive. But, it is not a powerful book to understand chakras form a Western perspective. However, I recommend reading it.
The organization of the book is around the seven major chakras. It begins with a description of the spirit of energy and chakra balancing. Each chapter thereafter is devoted to a chakra. And, the book ends with a discussion of integrated approaches.
She discusses the seven ways to balance your chakras:
The main chart of correspondences that occupies four pages in the book is extremely valuable as a reference to the chakra system.
She describes the energy flow from the crown to root chakra, and from the root to the crown chakra through the energetic equivalent of the spinal cord, the sushumna.
In the last chapter, she describes four integrated approaches to chakra healing:
Chakras and their Archetypes: Uniting Energy Awareness and Spiritual Growth, Ambika Wauters, The crossing Press, 1997, 164 p
I had great hopes for this book as it purported to relate the chakras to Western archetypes. And, to a certain extent it did that. However, the language got confusing at times, and made it difficult to discern the differences between some of the archetypes and the correlation to the chakras. Never the less, it was a helpful book for me to read, because it helped me take an accounting, in Western terms, of how balanced my chakras were and where I might have blockages. I would recommend it to any Westerner trying to understand chakras.
The book begins with a discussion of archetypes, myths, and chakras. The archetypes she selected for each chakra are:
In her model, the first of the paired archetypes listed above is the result of a blocked chakra, the second is open chakra spinning freely and allowing energy to flow up and down through the other chakras. It’s possible to have a blockage in one chakra and not another. But, the energy flow is diminished.
These seven pairs of archetypes provide a quick way for a Westerner to understand the health of their chakra system.
The author writes well, sometimes almost poetic as her introduction to chapter six on the heart chakra:
“The Heart chakra functions as the core of our physical bodies and our spiritual essence. As the heart is the most important organ in our body, known as the Emperor in Chinese medicine, so love is the center of our lives. The Heart chakra allows us to imbue our physical life with the radiance of love, joy, unity, and kinship, and stimulates our sense of touch and delight in life. It is from the spiritual heart that the deepest meaning of life is felt and expressed.
To flourish and develop as a compassionate and loving person we need to be receptive to love. When our hearts are open we are at peace with ourselves and with those around us and we feel harmoniously balanced within ourselves. The experience of love helps us make fuller connections to the beauty and light of other people, as well as ourselves. Love is, after all, the foundation of life.
We are born with open Hearts, but as we enter into the illusions of life which separate us off from the eternal presence of love we shut our hearts down. In this world we need protection for our innocence, our purity and our joy. It is not safe to stay open and vulnerable to the harsh reality of other people's negativity and fear. We could not survive feeling totally exposed to others' pain. As we grow older we learn to protect this vulnerability by closing our Heart center down. Unfortunately we lose our capacity to trust in the ever-present goodness of life and find ourselves fixed in a groove of discontent and unhappiness. What we most long for and desire is then unavailable to us and we may find that we are starving for love. We may try many things to cover the feeling of emptiness, from drugs and sex, to overeating or overworking. We can pretend we are sophisticated and that love doesn't matter to us, but we know in our hearts that it is the only thing that truly counts in our lives and there is no substitute to cover its loss.
When we fall in love we are the most alive and joyful we can possibly be. We have found a significant other to share ourselves with and to know all the glory that God intended us to experience. When we are in love we are at one with ourselves and with all life.
The two archetypes which exemplify the energy of the Heart chakra are the Actor/Actress and the Lover. One is an archetypal portrait of the pretense of love which is not truly integrated in its experience. The other archetype is completely open to and enjoys the wonder of love.”
Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System, Anodea Judith, Llewellyn Publications, 1987, 453 p
This is the most comprehensive of the three books I’ve read on chakras. It’s obviously stood the test of time as it’s been through severed edition and 27 printings.
The book, like the other two is organized around the seven chakras. It begins with a chapter entitled “And the Wheel Turns” that describes the chakra system, its history and its correlations with other systems of thought.
In her model the energy flow through the sushumna represents in Western terms the balancing of the pull of mind and spirit with the pull of soul and body. The journey from the crown to the root chakra she calls the manifesting current for it moves towards form, density, boundaries, contraction and individuality – the pull of soul and body. And, the journey from the root to the crown chakra she calls the liberating current that moves towards freedom, expansion, abstraction and universality – the pull of mind and spirit.
Besides the excellent descriptions of each of the chakras, each chapter begins with a meditation and has numerous exercises and movements that can help balance the chakra. I also found her one word associations for each of the chakras useful:
The ending chapters are not as powerful those that came before, but it in no ways detracts from the value of the book. Throughout the book, she mentions how chakras interact between people. Her descriptions ring true to my experience. She sums this up in one of the end sections and expands the concept out to cultures. This direction of thought is something that really interests me, for I see the correlation between how groups of people function and the chakra systems of the people in the group.
This is not an easy read, but a book that requires study, and as a result, a book I would recommend for anyone seriously interested in learning about chakras.
“Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations…In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all others.” Alexis de Tocqueville
This is an incredible work of scholarship and insight. It is not an easy read, but a read filled with insights almost on every page. The magnitude of the task to identify and explain the spirit of democratic capitalism that gives the form energy and success is formidable. Michael Novak is almost uniquely qualified to take on this task. He is a theologian, deeply steeped in the Catholic tradition, a history, philosopher and an economist. The Wall Street Journal gave the book high praise when it published that the book was “The most remarkable and original treatise on the roots of modern capitalism to be published in many years.”
I really enjoyed this book, and I want to thank Paul Woodruff for making this academic research accessible. I think we need a lot more of this right now. We are in a time period of radical change, when much of what we accepted as “truth” is shifting out from under our feet. During times of great change, it’s wise to relearn the basics. Who are we? What are we all about? And, where do we want to go?
“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
This book is at the same time engaging and appalling. Either which way you might interpret it; it is a book that you have to read. It provides clues into some of what has been happening in America. By tying together the success of the Republican Party in the last several elections, companies like Starbucks and Applebee’s, and the mega churches, the authors have pulled the curtain back on the tools, principles and mechanisms of manipulating people into doing what an organization wants them to do.
Life targeting, or micro-targeting, as it has been recently tagged, is a methodology of predicting the behavior of micro segments of a society based on lifestyle and demographics. Then identifying specifically who these people are by name and contacting them with a message targeted to their micro sector. It is not necessary that the organization really hold the values held by the members of the micro segment, only that the organization can make the people believe that the organization does.
In the 1980’s I came to realize that organizational values were the key to success in the marketplace. While at IBM, I developed an organizational change methodology to determine the values of the customers, and change the values of an organization to reflect those values. This was described in a book I coauthored entitled Innovate! (McGraw Hill, 1994). We pointed out that here must be a values match between the customers and the values those customers perceived from the organization. And, that it was set of values that differentiated one organization from another. Moreover, that same set of values controlled the type of innovation most likely to be produced by the organization. Efficiency and effectiveness of the organization depends respectively on the target of the values focus and the spread of the values focus.
We, the authors of Innovate!, assumed naively that organizations were really interested in changing their values…
Do I hear protests from the readers? Some of you may be saying, “But lifestyle targeting has been used by consumer companies for a number of years.” That’s true, but not in the same way. Examples in Applebee’s America are described such as Applebee’s convincing individuals that they really cared about what happened to them. (Remember the ad showing the coach retiring?) When’s the last time you believed that a large corporation really cared about what happens to you. It is a business and until business stops being totally driven by shareholder value, concern for the individual will remain a lost value. Yet many of us need to believe that the message is true, and the corporation continues to grow.
Sosnik, Dowd and Fournier repeatedly give example from politics, business and mega churches that can be interpreted as I have. Politics goes one step further however. With American divided nearly equally between the two major parties, and low voter turnout, a small group of voters actually determine who wins. Using concepts like business, politicians can calculate the cost per vote in these micro segments and allocate money accordingly. The message they delver to these micro segments, if effective, swings the election, even if the candidate holds the values projected or not. It’s not about the issues. The American public glazes over when issues are discussed. It’s about the values connection between the candidate and the voters. This technique will win elections but it will forever divide us for there is no benefit of collaboration among differences. It exploits the differences.
Hypocrisy is defined as “a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.” This is the line we have crossed over in the current use of micro-targeting.
Eventually hypocrisy is revealed. It is just too difficult to sustain a pretense, and actions do indeed prove louder than words. But what America’s powerful have learned is that it takes a long time for people to perceive the pretense.
In First Democracy, Paul Woodruff points out that in Athens the primary role of public education was to prepare Athenians to be able to participate in their democracy. Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.
To the author’s credit, while they do not take the low view I have of micro-targeting as it is now practiced, they do point out that the values connections has to be real to be sustained:
“Navigating the Stormy Present - How to Be a Great Connector:
I. Make and Maintain a Gut Values Connection. Voters felt President Bush was a strong and decisive leader. They felt President Clinton cared about them and would work hard on their behalf. Both presidents fell out of favor when they were not true to their Gut Values, proving that authenticity matters in this era of spine, not spin.
2. Adapt. President Clinton realized he needed to change his message and methods to appeal to Swing Is and Swing IIs. Eight years later, President Bush determined that there were no longer enough swing voters to make a difference and that he had to find new Republican voters.
3. LifeTarget. President Clinton barely scratched the surface of the potential to find and motivate voters based on their lifestyles. President Bush took it to a new level in 2004.
4. Talk Smart. Both presidents broke new ground in niche and local advertising, constantly looking for ways to communicate to their voters through the channels those voters used to get information.
5. Find Navigators. President Bush's campaign identified more than 2 million people who could influence how their friends, family members, and associates make political decisions.”
In each of the three markets they analyzed, they provide the above roadmap.
Applebee’s America describes a methodology that is borrowed from Myer’s Briggs Personality Type, the concepts of lifestyle, the concepts of generations, demographics and the concepts of the tipping point. It’s pieces of these sets of concepts lashed together in a way that is incredibly effective, according the authors.
Oh, by the way, how did the Republican’s get the specific names, addresses, telephone numbers and in some cases e-mail addresses for the members of the micro-target sectors? Well, they got them the same way that business do from credit card transactions, and from the membership of some of the mega churches. Is this ethical?
So far I’ve been writing about the first part of the book – Great Connectors. I personally found the second part of the book – Great Change – much more professionally interesting. The chapters on anxious Americans, the 3 C’s (connectors, community and civic engagement), navigators and generation 9/11 give a good, insightful view of present day America with some views of the future. However, as a professional I would have preferred to get accessible references to the data they quoted to make a point (none are given). Example:
“…’protecting the family’ rose to become the No. 1 value of American’s (cited by 53 percent of respondents in a 2000 Roper analysis.”
Anyone who works with data taken from surveys knows that it is important to know the context and how the data was collected and what else the data indicates in order to interpret it.
The author’s provide:
“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:
1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.
2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.
3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.
4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.
5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.
6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.
7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.
8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.
9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.
10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”
In spite of my negative reaction to what they were saying in the first part of the book, I liked the book. It’s a book that should be read by many and the focus for a lot of discussion.
It was very curious to me that the book (inadvertently?) undercut the approach of the first part of the book with the second part. In politics, the battle between micro-targeting and grass roots civic engagement is being fought out in present and future elections. If I have a vote, I vote for the latter.
Serge Kahili King, the author of Urban Shaman, defines a shaman in the following way, "For the purposes of this book and my teachings, I define a shaman as a healer of relationships between mind and body, between people, between people and circumstances, between Humans and nature, and between matter and spirit. In practicing his or her healing, the shaman has a view of reality very different from the one most of the world uses..."
The author's view on openness is refreshing. "Widely spread knowledge actually has more potency than secrets locked up and unused. Knowledge held secret is about a useful as money under a miser's mattress. And the sacredness of knowledge lies not in its reservation for a few, but it's available to many. He goes on to say, "...shamans recognize no hierarchy or authority in matters of the mind; if ever a group of people could be said to follow a system of spiritual democracy, it would be the shamans of the world."
The three aspects of consciousness according to Hawaiian shamanism are the ku (the heart, the body or subconscious), the lono (the mind, or conscious mind) and the kane (the spirit or super conscious).
Ku is a close equivalent of the western concept of the subconscious, but it is not identical. In this paradigm, memory is stored as a movement pattern or vibration. Genetic memory is stored at the cellular level and experiential memory is stored at one or more muscular levels. "The area of storage seems to be related to which part of the body was active or energized during the learning. When the part of the body in which memory was stored is under sufficient tension, then that memory is inhibited or even inaccessible."
"When muscle tension is released, any memory stored in that area and inhibited by the tension is also released." In this paradigm, this is why massage works.
The implications of the concept of ku are many. "This means that whatever memories you dwell on will be affecting your body in the present moment, producing more or less the same chemical and muscular reactions that occurred when the event first happened. A good memory can produce endorphins and a bad memory can produce toxins, all in the present moment."
It also implies that the ku does not distinguish between whether the experience came from an actual situation or a book, dream, intuition or imagination. "All the ku cares about is the intensity of the experience; that is, how much physiological (emotional, chemical, muscular) reaction occurred during the experience. That is the ku's only basis for how 'real' the experience was. The practical side of this is that an intensely imagined experience is just as good as the real thing, as least as far as memory-based behavior is concerned." Athletes use this fact when they imagine the body motions that have to go through to perform. King assets, "The same process can be used to train yourself in any skill, state, or condition whatsoever."
"The primary function of the ku is memory," writes King, "and its primary motivation is pleasure. To put it more accurately, the ku's motivation is towards pleasure and away from pain." This is the reason why we like to do some things and not others, and why certain things are very difficult. "The ku automatically moves towards what is pleasurable and does its best to avoid what is painful."
Remembering that the ku does not distinguish between actual and imagined experience, it becomes clear that imagination has extreme power. "If you create a future memory - in other words, if imagine what will happen if you do a certain thing - your ku's behavior will be strongly influenced by whether the memory carries the expectation of pain or pleasure. If you have created the expectation/memory that human encounters may result in painful rejection, you will find it hard to meet or be with people, to make phone calls (especially sales calls), and possibly even to write letters."
In this paradigm, the ku will provide the least painful solution if no pleasurable alternatives exist in memory. For example, if you have a stressful job, that is your job is creating pain, your ku will make you sick to get out of the job because it is less painful to be sick.
"In order to operate its memory function and engage motivation, the ku uses its primary tool of sensation. According to this concept, all memory is kinesthetic, or body related; all pleasure and pain as well; and all experience, even of emotions and ideas, produces physical sensation."
The second aspect of consciousness is lono. "The lono is that part of yourself which is consciously aware of internal and external input; of memories, thoughts, ideas, imaginings, intuitions, hunches, and inspirations, as well as sensory impressions of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, depth, movement, pressure, time, and others. It hangs out on the border, so to speak, between the inner and outer worlds. The primary function of the lono is decision making." And, decision making requires attention, intent, choosing and interpretation: "...lono decides what's important and what is not and attention follows the decision."
"Intent is a kind of decision making that directs awareness as well as activity. It is a powerful way to manage your ku, with tremendous effects on health, happiness, and success when used properly." There are three ways to manage your ku - authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire.
"When you intend to walk across the room, the intention is followed by awareness, which is followed by action." If a controlling, authoritative style is used, the resulting movements are awkward and halting. If a cooperative style is used, a smooth, fluid movement results. An uncontrolled style results in too many distractions, too many pleasurable paths to follow.
In speaking, "A controlling lono interferes with the process by trying to make sure that the right words are said in the right way and usually creates havoc in the form of halting speech with a lot of 'uh's or 'ya know's or even stuttering. The cooperative lono holds the intent and lets the ku do its thing, which often produces spontaneous humor and unexpectedly good insights or phrases. The uncontrolling lono lets the ku wander off the subject or even speak gibberish."
"Choosing is what most people think of as decision making. Choosing is making a decision to turn your attention to one direction rather than another."
"Interpretation is a decision about the meaning or validity of an experience."
"I spoke of the primary motivation of the ku being pleasure which explains a lot of human behavior. Even more behavior can be explained by the primary motivation of the lono, which is order. Order doesn't necessarily mean neatness although some lonos may interpret it that way. It has more to do with rules, categories, and understanding."
"The primary tool of the lono is imagination. Since the lono is the only part of you under your direct control, the development of this tool is of supreme importance..."
The third aspect of consciousness is kane. "Kane is conceived of as a 'source' aspect; a purely spiritual essence which manifests or projects into realty our physically oriented being. It might also be called the soul or oversoul as long as you don't get the idea that that it is something that can be lost or separated form you."
"The primary function of the kane is creativity in the form of mental and physical experience. Simplified, the lono generates a pattern by deciding that something is true, ku memorizes the pattern, and kane uses the pattern to manifest experience. At the same time, kane is constantly giving inspiration to improve the pattern because its primary motivation is harmony." Kane's "motivation is to help the whole self integrate patterns more harmoniously with others in the community and environment."
"The primary tool of the kane is energy. The universe is made of energy and it is energy that that maintains and changes the dreams of life. The imagination of the lono directs the energy and the sensation of the ku lets us experience its effects."
King describes seven principles and fourteen corollaries of urban shamanism (Hawaiian word shown first in caps):
IKE - The World is What You Think It Is
Corollary: Everything is a dream
"For the shamans, the experience we call ordinary everyday reality is a mass hallucination, or to put it more politely, a shared dream. It's like we are all having our own individual dreams about life and the sharing occurs at points of agreement or consensus."
"If this life is a dream," he writes, "and if we can wake up fully within it, then we can change the dream by changing our dreaming."
Corollary: All systems are arbitrary
King comments, "The meaning of experience depends upon your interpretation of it or your decision to accept someone else's interpretation, and the decision to accept a basic assumption is also arbitrary."
KALA - There Are No Limits
Corollary: Everything is connected
Corollary: Anything is possible
Corollary: Separation is a useful illusion
The universe has no limits and therefore our experiences are limitless. However, in everyday life, we experience limits. There are two kinds of limits - filtered and creative. Filtered limitation is "imposed by ideas and beliefs that inhibit creativity rather than enhance it..." "Filtered limitations generate focus without the potential for positive action."
"...creative limitation assumes the purposeful establishment of limits within an infinite universe in order to create particular experiences." When we play a game, we follow the rules of the game; otherwise it has no meaning. "The rules of the game are limitations created so you can play the game." Later he writes, "Creative limitation allows us to improve our creative abilities by enforcing a focus on a certain range of interpretation of experience." "Even in the limited game of chess, human minds have not figured out all the possibilities," he points out.
MAKIA - Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
Corollary: Attention goes where energy flows
Corollary: Everything is energy
In discussing the third principle, King considers mediation and hypnosis. He explains that both are two aspects of the same thing - conditions of sustained focused attention. He writes, "You are meditating whenever you are engaged in sustained focused attention on anything, and according to this philosophy such attention channels the energy of the universe into manifesting the physical equivalent of the focus. However, the manifestation is not just the equivalent of what you are looking at, saying, listening to, or doing. It is the equivalent of the sum total of your entire attention, including habitual expectation, during the meditation. To put it another way, whenever lono is meditating, ku is meditating, ku is meditating too. Part of one's development as a shaman involves learning how to get lono and ku to meditate on the same thing at the same time. Then the magic happens."
In discussing the first corollary, the author writes, "Attention is quite naturally attracted to bright lights, shiny objects, and loud noises, but we may not realize that the common factor of all three is their energy intensity. Attention is attracted to any strong source of energy that stimulates any of our senses, even those subtle senses of which most people are unaware." He goes on to explain that we are likewise attracted to certain people or geographic regions because of their energy. In his view, the sacred geographic spots are actually spots of low energy where people can de-stress.
King stops short of calling on physics to explain that everything is energy, but I think that physics is the best way to explain his second corollary. Einstein proved that energy and mass were transformable one into the other. The conversion factor was the speed of light squared, E=MC². Mass or matter is just highly condensed energy. Therefore our bodies and our thoughts are energy as well.
MANAWA - Now is the Moment of Power
Corollary: Everything is relative.
Corollary: Power increases with sensory attention.
Some Eastern and Western traditions focus on the past or future. With the concept of karma we are trapped into either good or bad karma depending upon our actions in the past, and we create good or bad karma for our future depending upon actions now. "In these traditions karma isn't usually something you can change; all you can do is reap the rewards or work off the debts of the past."
Many Western traditions hold that you are rewarded in life or after life for obeying specific social or religious rules, and punished if you don't.
"The shamanic tradition, both warrior and adventurer versions, is in stark contrast to the above views. It says that the past did not give you what you have today, nor make you what you are. It is your beliefs, decisions, and actions today about yourself and the world around you that give you what you have and make you what you are."
"Now is the moment of power. But, how do we define what now is? The easiest and most practical definition is: the area or range of present attention." In other words, if your attention span is a second, or less, so is now. But, if you can focus longer, now becomes longer.
"Unfortunately, some people are obsessively locked onto the past, future, or elsewhere because of great fear and anger...Much of the fear and anger can be dissipated by shifting focus to the sensory present..."
ALOHA - To Love Is to Be Happy With
Corollary: Love increases as judgement decreases.
Corollary: Everything is alive, aware, and responsive.
In English, the use of the word love has become sloppy. "In Hawaiian the meaning of love is very clear and it provides a useful guideline for loving and being loved. Aloha is the word for love. The root alo means to be with, to share an experience, here and now. The root oha means affection, joy."
MANA - All Power Comes From Within
Corollary: Everything has power.
Corollary: Power comes from authority.
Many other traditions teach that power exists outside of us and that we are relatively powerless. "In complete and, for some, shocking contrast, Huna philosophy teaches that all the power that creates your experience comes from your own body, mind, and spirit. Logically speaking, if there are no limits, then the Universe or Source of Life is infinite, and if it is infinite, then all of its power is at every point of it, including the point which you define as you. Keeping the discussion at a practical level, nothing ever happens to you without your participation. For every event that you experience you creatively attract it through your beliefs, desires, fears and expectations, and then react to it habitually or respond to it consciously."
"Power comes from authority" is the second corollary to this sixth principle. But the authority is inside you, not external. "Speaking with authority means speaking with confidence that your words will produce results," he writes.
PONO - Effectiveness Is the Measure of Truth
Corollary: There is always another way to do anything.
"Many people have trouble with this one at first because they think that it says that the end justify the means. Actually it says just the opposite, that the means determine the end. Violent means will produce violent results, and peaceful means will produce peaceful results."
Other topics covered in the book are, the seven shaman talents, creating harmony in the body, initiating change through intuition, changing the world with shaman dreaming, shape changing and community service, increasing your creative energy, from inner peace to outer peace, the healing power of symbols, the healing art of ceremony and ritual, and the pooling of minds.
The book has many short exercises throughout. They are easily doable by an apprentice shaman, or just someone curious. King uses them to reinforce points he has made.
The book is about radical new paradigm for the western mind, but it is written very clearly and simply. It contains more wisdom than can be obtained from a simple reading so I suggest that if you are serious about learning from the author that you create a study group. That way you can learn and practice together at a pace slow enough to absorb more of what he has to offer.
Urban Shaman: A Handbook for Personal and Planetary Transformation Based on the Hawaiian Way of the Adventurer
Serge Kahili King
Simon & Shuster, 1990
To read a poem by King from this book, Ode to a Toad, go to the Innovation Road Map Travelogue.
This book is a must read for anyone interested in an innovation commons. Much of the book revolves around and depends upon the successful creation of innovation commons in many different forms. The following are some excerpts from the book that seem to me to be most directly related to the subject of the innovation commons.
The next six represent the new forms of collaboration, which the new platform created by the first three forces made possible:
The last force is an enabler:
Quoting Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, "This emerging era is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working together in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius." p93
In discussing some of the problems of an innovation commons, he raises the following question:
"If everyone contributes his or her intellectual capital for free, where will the resources for innovation come from? And won’t we end up with in endless legal wrangles over which part of any innovation was made by the community for free, and meant to stay that way, and which part was added on by some company for profit and has to be paid for so that the company can make money to drive further innovation." p96
"How do you push innovation forward if everyone is working for free and giving away their work?…if innovators are not going to be rewarded for their innovations, the incentive for path-breaking innovation will dry up and so will the money for the really deep R&D that is required to drive progress in this increasingly complex field." (Paraphrasing Microsoft) p100
"Open source is an important flattener because it makes available for free many tools, from software to encyclopedias, that millions of people around the world would have had to buy in order to use, and because open source network associations – with their open borders and come-one-come-all approach – can challenge hierarchical structures with a horizontal model of innovation that is clearly working in a growing number of areas." p102
Writing about the power of search engines for collaboration: "How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming’. In-forming is the individual’s’ personal analog to open sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply chaining and offshoring. In-forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain – a supply chain of information, knowledge and entertainment. In-forming is about self collaboration…" p153
"…this tenth flattener - the steroids – is going to amplify and further empower all the other forms of collaboration. These steroids should make open-source innovation that much more open, because they will enable more individuals to collaborate with one another in more ways and from more places than ever before." p 170-171
He then introduces the concept of the triple convergence: "First, right around the year 2000, all ten flatteners…started to converge and work together in ways that created a new, flatter, global playing field. As this new playing field became established, both businesses and individuals began to adopt new habits, skills and processes to get the most out of it. They moved from largely vertical means of creating value to more horizontal one. The merger of this new playing field for doing business with the new ways of doing business was the second convergence, and it actually helped to flatten the world even further. Finally, just when all this flattening was happening, a whole new group of people, several billion in fact, walked on the playing field from China, India and the former Soviet Union. Thanks to the new flat world, and its new tools, some of them were able to collaborate and compete directly with everyone else. This was the third convergence." p175
Writing about the parallel between the work of economists of the impact of major technologies on productivity, he stated: "The same thing is happening today with the flattening of the world. Many of the ten flatteners have been around for years. But for the full flattening effects to be felt, we needed not only the ten flatteners to converge, but also something else. We needed the emergence of a large cadre of managers, innovators, business consultant, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs and workers to get comfortable with, and develop, the sorts of horizontal collaboration and value creation processes and habits that could take advantage of this new, flatter playing field. In short, the convergence of the ten flatteners begat the convergence of a set of business practices and skills that would get the most out of the flat world. And then the tow began to mutually reinforce each other." p178
"In the future globalization is going to be increasingly driven by individuals who understand the flat world, adapt themselves quickly to its processes and technologies, and then start to march forward…They will be of every color of the rainbow and from every corner of the world." p183
"The flatter the world gets, the more we are going to need a system of global governance that keeps up with all the new legal and illegal forms of collaboration." p217
"In the flat world, the division of labor is steadily becoming more and more complex, with a lot more people interacting with a lot of other people they don’t know and may never meet. If you want to have a modern complex division of labor, you have to put more trust in strangers." p326
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Friedman
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005
This is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures and mental images. It is a hopeful book, and it is a profound book. Its mission is no less than to change our paradigm from competition to collaboration in how we perceive, think and act in all that we do. The authors opening line is "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities."
They argue that life has a natural and spontaneous tendency towards organization. "Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order - order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities."
The central part of the book is organized around a poem by A. R. Ammons:
"I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper - though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."
The authors write, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."
They believe Darwinism has led us to believe that life wasn't supposed to happen, that it was an accident, and that life has to fight to continue to exist. In their view, "Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not defend."
They point out that all of us are trying to describe our reality to others. But reality outside of us, in an absolute sense, evades us. "We peer out through our senses, describing our experiences of what we think reality to be. We choose images to convey our expereince. We create metaphors to connect what we see. We explore new ways of understanding what seems to be happening and what we think it means."
Peering out at the world, they describe seven principles of life's process of creating:
Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence."
"There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores it space of possibilities", Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, a combination of words that could be used to describe how an organization innovates.
Their assertion is that "life tinkers itself into existence". "It tinkers toward order - toward systems that are more complex and effective...Almost always what begins in randomness ends in stability...generates systems that sustain diverse individuals." But they conclude, "Life seeks order in a disorderly way."
"All this messy playfulness creates relationships that make more available...," they write. "Who we become together will always be different that who we were alone. Our range of creative expression increases as we join with others. New relationships create new capacities."
"Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery," they conclude.
"The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other." Living systems they believe create more possibilities and more freedom for individuals.
In this systems behaviors emerge. "Science writer Kevin Kelly describes these systems as a 'messy cascade of interdependent events ...What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important'."
One of the important features of viable living systems is simultaneity. "Simultaneity reduces the impact of any one error. More errors matter less if the actors are not linked together sequentially. The space for experimentation increases as we involve more minds in the experiment, as long as they can operate independently. What links people together is their focus on a needed solution. But in discovering what works, they are not waiting for one another to act."
They very carefully describe the discipline of play required for success. "Playful tinkering requires consciousness. If we are not mindful, if our attention slips, then we can't notice what's available or discover what's possible. Staying present is the discipline of play. Great concentration and focus are required." As a result, "Playful enterprises are alert. They are open to information, always seeking more, yearning for surprises."
Over and over again they stress the role that diversity plays in creation. "Parallel process requires both diversity and freedom. There is more than one workable solution, and these solutions arise from many different forms of self-expression...Life is not driving us toward one solution. The world is interested in pluralism. Only in this way can it discover more about itself...The world's desire for diversity compels us to change."
Systems offer the possibility for more stability. But in a curious paradox, that stability for the system depends upon its member's ability to change. "When individuals fail to experiment or when a system refuses their offers of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant, interior change, it sinks into the death grip of equilibrium. It no longer participates in coevolution. The system becomes vulnerable; its destruction is self-imposed...This broad paradox of stability and freedom is the stage on which coevolution dances. Life leaps forward when it can share its learnings. The dense web of systems allow information to travel in all directions, speeding recovery and adaptation."
If systems of life are self-organizing then we don't have to design how they will organize. We live in a universe where we get order for free. "If order is for free, we don't have to be the organizers. We don't have to design the world. We don't have to structure its existence."
And, in a prescription for systems that has a lot to do with an innovation commons, "As we organize, we need to keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much trust exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"
"Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity and compliance. We may have thought that our organization's survival was guaranteed by finding the right form and insisting that everyone fit into it. But sameness is not stability. It is individual freedom that creates stable systems. It is diffferentness that enables us to thrive," they propose.
In writing about self, they suggest, "Life wants to happen. It calls itself into existence. Out of all information and all possibilities, an entity comes into form. An identity emerges. A self has created itself...No externally imposed plans or designs are required. The process of invention always takes place around an identity. There is a self that seeks to organize and make its presence known. The desires of self set a self-organizing world into motion."
Research suggests that we perceive the world based on who we have decided to be, "...at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be...At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain." The corollary to this is that "We will change our self if we believe that the change will preserve the self."
In answering the question about what conditions will allow self-organization to flourish, they state "We need to trust that we are self organizing...We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structures or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around...Identity includes such dimensions as history, values, actions, core beliefs, competencies, principles, purpose, mission...Identity is the source of organizations. Every organization is an identity in motion, moving through the world, trying to make a difference."
In search of that illusive concept of emergence, they write, "Emergence is the surprising capacity we discover only when we join together. New systems have properties that appear suddenly and mysteriously. These properties cannot be predicted. They do not exist in the individuals who compose the system. What we know about the individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different.
One of the current quandaries facing free, open collaboratives is compensation. It is very clear that participants benefit in many other tangible and intangible ways from the collaboration. However, in our present form of capitalism, no standard form of monetary compensation has emerged. The authors don't provide much hope of one being developed, "Once systems are called into the world by our individual explorations, it becomes impossible to work backwards. Systems cannot be deconstructed. We can't figure out cause and effect or who contributed what. There are no heroes or permanent leaders in an emergent, systems creating world. There are too many simultaneous connection; individual contributions evolve too rapidly into group efforts."
We often talk about synergy in a group, where 1 + 1 > 2. Their paradigm revolutionizes the way to think about a system, "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. The system is a new and different and unique contribution to its members and the world. To search backwards in time for its parts is to deny the self transforming nature of systems. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. We can't disentangle the effects of so many relationships. The connections never end. They are impossible to understand by analysis."
In amplifying their concept that self-organizing systems merge through trust, they write, "Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the expereince vulnerable, unprotected by the illusionary cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage others in the experiment. We are willing to commit to a systems whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion...in systems of trust, people are free to create the relationships they need. Trust enables the system to open. The system expands to include those it had excluded. More conversations - more diverse and diverging views - become important. People decide to work with those from whom they have been separate."
We long for meaning in our lives. "Each of us embodies the boundless energies of life. We are creating, systems-seeking, self-organizing, meaning-seeking beings. We are identities in motion, searching for the relationships that will evoke more from us."
A Simpler Way
Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Berrett-Koehler, 1996
This book by Strauss and Howe proclaims itself on the cover as "An American Prophecy", and the book has the subtitle of "What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny". Those are strong words when speaking of the future. H. G. Wells commented that demography is destiny. I believe that. For example, we know a lot about all the 20-year-olds in the U.S. in 2025. Why? Because they've all been born, even those that will immigrate into the U.S. But when you couple demography with social trends, I become less sure. Humans have a nasty habit of doing the unexpected, as well as responding to events in unexpected ways. Strauss and Howe couple demography with sociology and add in some ideas about generations to produce a prophecy. In doing so I think they fall prey to a weakness we all succumb too occasionally, especially me, of pushing their insights too far into specifics and detail. However, if their prophecy is 10% right, they still deserve to be listened to, and maybe even to take actions to prepare for the America they prophesize.
4. "The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one." In the current saeculum, this era is left unnamed but would start around 2005 and end around 2026.
If Strauss and Howe are correct, at this point in time, we are at the cusp of entering a crisis era. The previous crisis era was introduced by the great depression and W.W.II. Prior crisis eras also began with wars - Civil War (1860), American Revolution (1773), Glorious Revolution (1675), Armada Crisis (1569) and Wars of the Roses (1459). Are the wars we are in right now the catalysts for our next crisis era?
The second building block in Strauss and Howe's model is the concept of generations. "Of all the cycles known to man, the one we all know best is the human life cycle. No other societal force - not class, not nationality, not culture, not technology - has a predictable a chronology. The limiting length of an active life cycle is one of civilization's great constants...Biologically and socially, a full human life is divided into four phases: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. Each phase of life is the same length as the others, capable of holding one generation at a time. And, each phase is associated with a specific social role that conditions how its occupants perceive the world and act on those perceptions." And, each phase is about 20 years long:
Late Elderhood (84+) - social role is dependence, receiving comfort from institutions, remembering values
In this model, only the first four are considered active in shaping American society. This assumption is certainly suspect as the late elderhood bracket swells and people remain mentally and physically active longer.
These two building blocks of the Strauss and Howe model, the saeculum and generations, act together to create the engine for social change. Consider for example childhood. A childhood spent during a first turning, a high, would be vastly different than one spent during a crisis or fourth turning.
But the key thing to consider is the mix of generations in any turning of the saeculum. For example, in a fourth turning, the crisis era the author's predict we are now in:
The Late Elderhood generation, whose role according to the authors, is dependence is the only generation to have experienced the last crisis.
The third building block of the Strauss and Howe model is the naming of generations, depending upon their place in the saeculum at different life stages. The naming implies that we can, to a first approximation, group people in a generation and ascribe some common characteristics. This is a dangerous assumption, but useful if you're going to make any sense of generations and social change. The characterizations are general tendencies and do not apply to individuals within a generation.
The fourth building block of the model is the concept of archetypes. Strauss and Howe identity four archetypes - Hero, Nomad, Prophet and Artist. These four archetypes cycle through our society as generations.
The generations in play right now are:
If the authors are correct, we have just entered a Crisis that will last for the next 20 years. In this Crisis the elders will be Prophets, those in midlife will be Nomads, young adults will be Heroes and our children will be Artists. According to the authors, families will be strengthening and we will over protect our children. The gap between genders will widen. Ideals will be championed, new institutions will be founded and our culture will be practical. Our interest in community will be growing and our social structure will begin to unify. Our worldview will be moving from complexity to simplicity. What will motivate us socially will be a concern over blots in our record. We will develop a sense of urgency and a sense that we need to fix our outer world. If wars occur, they will be total.
The morphology of a crisis era will is:
While I am reluctant to present their recommendations, I do so for your own analysis. To me the recommendations appear to have a political bias. According to the authors to prepare for the fourth turning, or crisis, America should:
For individuals they recommend:
It is incredibly important that we as a society understand the predictions in this book. We must decide not only if they are right or wrong, but also even if they are right, are we predetermined to this future, or can we through collective decisions and actions avoid the future they say is inevitable. Is technology a wild card in their scenario? Will it accelerate the Crisis or help us avoid it? And, for all the cases, what are we going to do about it?
The Fourth Turing - An American Prophecy
What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny
William Strauss and Neil Howe
Broadway Books, 1997
It was Sunday. Chance was in the garden. He moved slowly, dragging the green hose from one path to the next, carefully watching the flow of the water. Very gently he let the stream touch every plant, every flower, every branch of the garden. Plants were like people; they needed care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully.