On May 5, the day I left home for the journey described in my last post, I received notice that my latest book had been published.
This one is co-authored with Kaz Gozdz, a remarkable being who discovered, by working as a midlevel manager, that developing people is essential to developing profits, so went off to study with such luminaries as community-development leader Scott Peck, Stanford Business professor Michael Ray, Systems and Learning Organization leader Peter Senge, and more, to learn how to do so. In the process he picked up a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology and began to define a new metaphysics.
So the ideas this book is based on are dear to my heart, and what Kaz has achieved is wonderful to behold.
The book is written for academics and is entitled Developing Third-Generation Learning Organizations, a Heuristic Discovery Process. But, even though there are hundreds of footnotes, I think we managed to make it readable. In it, we not only outline Kaz' process (and mine) for transforming leadership processes in organizations, but we also lay out some of the fundamentals of systems thinking, culture dynamics, and the role metaphysics plays in our experience.
Here's a snippet:
This one is co-authored with Kaz Gozdz, a remarkable being who discovered, by working as a midlevel manager, that developing people is essential to developing profits, so went off to study with such luminaries as community-development leader Scott Peck, Stanford Business professor Michael Ray, Systems and Learning Organization leader Peter Senge, and more, to learn how to do so. In the process he picked up a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology and began to define a new metaphysics.
So the ideas this book is based on are dear to my heart, and what Kaz has achieved is wonderful to behold.
The book is written for academics and is entitled Developing Third-Generation Learning Organizations, a Heuristic Discovery Process. But, even though there are hundreds of footnotes, I think we managed to make it readable. In it, we not only outline Kaz' process (and mine) for transforming leadership processes in organizations, but we also lay out some of the fundamentals of systems thinking, culture dynamics, and the role metaphysics plays in our experience.
Here's a snippet:
"Humans construct their metaphysics, worldview, and mental models based on their own developmental level, which then becomes the basis for their culture and experience.
"Whatever culture we grow up in, there’s both tacit and explicit assumptions about who people are and how the world works. Parents, peers, teachers, and the media all provide very definite, if not always consistent, messages about who and what we should understand ourselves to be, acceptable norms of behavior, and expectations for who and what we can become. We are enculturated to the society’s worldview. Yet, as our section on systems thinking documents, the reductionistic, mechanistic, western orthodox science, Industrial-Age view of people and the world, while it has accomplished great things for all humanity, has demonstrated itself to be limiting for individuals and destructive of the planetary environment.
"At some point, some people, Kaz being an example, break away from that worldview and begin to explore other options. While traditionally the liberal arts curriculum and college environment was designed to expand and clarify a person’s worldview, a college education no longer serves this function. New kinds of experiences are needed if individuals are to be able to develop in that way."
"Whatever culture we grow up in, there’s both tacit and explicit assumptions about who people are and how the world works. Parents, peers, teachers, and the media all provide very definite, if not always consistent, messages about who and what we should understand ourselves to be, acceptable norms of behavior, and expectations for who and what we can become. We are enculturated to the society’s worldview. Yet, as our section on systems thinking documents, the reductionistic, mechanistic, western orthodox science, Industrial-Age view of people and the world, while it has accomplished great things for all humanity, has demonstrated itself to be limiting for individuals and destructive of the planetary environment.
"At some point, some people, Kaz being an example, break away from that worldview and begin to explore other options. While traditionally the liberal arts curriculum and college environment was designed to expand and clarify a person’s worldview, a college education no longer serves this function. New kinds of experiences are needed if individuals are to be able to develop in that way."
That's from the conclusions... and in some ways it's just the beginning! :)
RSS Feed
