2004
Bill Torbert and associates illustrate how individuals and organizations can progress through more and more sophisticated "action-logics" -- strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it -- until they will eventually be able to practice action inquiry continually. Offering action inquiry exercises at the end of the chapters, the book moves from junior managers beginning to practice action inquiry through CEO's transforming whole companies, to world leaders transforming whole countries, as exemplified by Czech president Vaclav Havel. Through short stories of leadership and organizational transformations, this groundbreaking book illustrates how action inquiry increases personal integrity, relational mutuality, company profitability, and long-term organizational and environmental sustainability.
2001
A stellar list of contributors bring a variety of perspectives to establish one central theme: diversity is an advantage to be utilized, not a problem to be solved. Themselves representing a wide range of cultural, national, and vocational perspectives, the contributors examine how diversity creates new possibilities for working together in our projects, our organizations, and our lives. Working Together reveals diversity as a rich resource to meet the challenges of our changing times, an unparalleled opportunity to bring together a multiplicity of gifts for a common purpose.
2011
With more than twenty-five million copies in print, Who Moved My Cheese? has become a phenomenon. It does offer some reasonable advice about adapting to change. Its certainly true that some of the events shaping our lives are beyond our control, and instead of struggling against them we must adapt and move on. But for all its good intentions, it ultimately advises us to unquestioningly accept our circumstances without exploring any possible alternativeslike mice in a maze mindlessly chasing after cheese.
I Moved Your Cheese takes a different point of view and offers an alternative approach. Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra tells an inspiring story about a new generation of mice who begin to challenge assumptions and ask important questions. Rather than just accepting their situation and dutifully chasing the cheese, Max, Zed, and Big begin looking deeper, examining and reassessing what theyve been told are their limitations, and set out to chart a new course.
Innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, problem solving, and business growth as well as personal growth depend on the ability to challenge accepted notions, reshape the environment, and play by a different set of rules: our own. We are not powerless to change our circumstances. We can control our destiny. By ana- lyzing our assumptions about the limitations we seem to face, we can, like Max, Zed, and Big, discover how to overcome them. But first we need to understand the ways we unknowingly hold ourselves back. As Zed explains to Max, The problem is not that the mouse is in the maze but that the maze is in the mouse.
• From the bestselling author of When Corporations Rule the World
• An extensively researched, powerfully argued, eye-opening critique of how today's corporate captialism is destroying the things of real value in the world-like cancer destroys life
• Portrays a hopeful future-alternatives to a corporate-dominated and money-ruled world-in showing how to resore health to markets, democracy, and every day life
• Offers practical suggestions for individuals who want to contribute to the process of change
• Co-published with Kumarian Press
There is a deep chasm between the promises of the new global capitalism and the reality of social breakdown, spiritual emptiness, and environmental destruction it is leaving in its wake. In this important book, David Korten makes a compelling and well-documented case that capitalism is actually delivering a fatal blow not only to life, but also to democracy and the market. Among his startling ideas:
Capitalism is a pathology that commonly afflicts market economies in the absence of vigilant public oversight. Since the economy internal to a corporation is a planned economy, the current consolidation of economic control under a handful of global corporations is a victory for central planning-not the market economy. The alternative to the new global capitalism is a global system of thriving, healthy market economies that function as extensions of healthy local ecosystems to meet the livelihood needs of people and communities.
Radical as such proposals may seem, they actually reflect processes that are steadily gaining momentum around the world. The Post-Corporate World provides a vision of what's needed and what's possible, as well as a detailed agenda for change. Korten shows that to have a just, sustainable and compassionate society, concentrated absentee ownership and footloose speculative capital as embodied in the global, for-profit public corporation must be eliminated in favor of enterprises based on patient, rooted, stakeholder ownership limited to those who have a stake in the firm as a worker, supplier, customer, or member of the community in which it is located.
Korten outlines numerous specific actions to free the creative powers of individuals and societies through the realization of real democracy, the local rooting of capital through stakeholder ownership, and a restructuring of the rules of commerce to create "mindful market" economies that combine market principles with a culture that nurtures social bonding and responsibility.
Like Korten's previous bestseller, When Corporations Rule the World, this provocative book is sure to stimulate national dialogue and debate and inspire a bevy of grassroots discussions and initiatives. The Post-Corporate World presents readers with a profound challenge and an empowering sense of hope.