Recommended Books

This book really did help to change my life and it helped me to coach many of my clients to change theirs. It is simple to read and hard to put down. We have a choice: do we want to go down the path of judgement and blame or do we want to go down the path of the learner? We can choose - otherwise we will end up in the Judger pit, living the life of a victim. In that pit, we react, look for someone to blame and look at our relationships with others as win/lose (in other words lose-lose). The learner looks at things differently and is pro-active in his or her choices. I've just been working with people going through a major downsizing. One of the senior executives who had just been made redundant asked me, "What did I do wrong?" Practising what I learned we worked on asking questions that were useful in the circumstance (and choosing the Learner path) like, "What can I learn?" "What opportunities are there for me out there?" "What would I like to do next?" It helped her to shift and she landed a senior job within a very short time in a new and totally different organisation.

A simple and easy process for making room to think. She helps you to create a Thinking Environment that allows human beings to think for themselves. The most important and interesting part for us has been learning to form and use 'Incisive Questions' to remove limiting assumptions.

This book was written because its author foresees more and more 'white water' coming in the future. He says, '..beyond all other new skills and attitudes that permanent white water requires, people have to be (or become) extremely effective learners.' He gives alternatives to institutional learning and tells you how you can use each of these. For anyone truly interested in learning, this is a must read.

With good examples and exercises, this helps you to see how you can use story-telling in your own organisation. Stories are memorable, entertaining, people-centric and can help to explain or make clear something that is quite complex easily and quickly. They encourage creativity and help to handle emotion and 'undiscussables'. After all, a 'story' isn't real life, is it? We are really excited by this book, especially because of our earlier work on story-telling at work (speaker at Corporate Memory, Corporate Amnesia workshop) and our current work with Scenario Planning (see Chapter 8).

How we see organisations has a lot to do with how we interact with them. We are brought up in a Newtonian world and we frequently view organisations as machines. My experience is that organisations actually are organisms: it does not help us to dissect them to examine the parts, rather we need to look at them in terms of the whole. In this book, Meg Wheatley has taken the New Sciences (Quantum Theory, Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory, Field Theory among others) and put it into the context of living life in organisations and what this means to how we live that life. How do we interact? What difference does how we view the organisation make to our interaction and most importantly to its success? It is fascinating and a must-read. I kept thinking, Yes! This is what I observe. It connects what I am observing and experiencing to the latest scientific thinking.

There is a quote from Laurens Van Der Post 'Every man must be his own leader. He now knows enough not to follow other people. He must follow the light that's within himself, and through this light he will create a new community.' That is what the book is about, totally in line with our belief of leadership is a necessary skill for all. There are seven 'Pathways of Mastery' each having a set of questions for you to think about in defining yourself as a leader. There is also a summary at the end of each chapter to help you come back to the book later.

We found this very thought provoking. Stewardship is leadership as we all hope that it can be - the very best it can be. Sometimes one found oneself saying, "Yes, but what will our clients think of this?!" It is a leadership model to aspire to and it is the way we run our organisation (or at least we try!).

The best thing about this book is that it teaches you to deal with the hundreds of emails we all get daily. Corporate life is difficult enough without having so many differing demands on your finite time. Of course none of it is rocket science, starting with prioritising and making choices and focusing. It is easy to read, and has checklists (one page summaries) as a reminder at the end of the book. I got my emails to a manageable level, even when working on a client site and receiving about 100 a day. And to respond appropriately (to those I needed to respond to) within 48 hours. That was the most useful piece for me, although it has a section on how to say 'No' which could be useful if that is difficult for you. It can be dipped into, going to the areas where you would like help or read as a whole.

Linked to Leadership and the New Science in that Lance Secretan is making the same comparisons: is an organisation a machine or an organism? If our experience shows that it is an organism, how do we make our organisations more effective? He has a nice model called the Value Cycle (looks like a bicycle in the diagram) - that gives us great questions to ask ourselves in our organisations. How do we create organisations that don't kill us with stress and burn-out? How do we make a sanctuary for the soul? Most people will have had an opportunity to work in a department that was a sanctuary: a place where you felt you were being the best you could be, that the team was more than just the sum of its parts, that you were being supported. For various reasons, in today's world they don't normally last very long. However, using the ideas in this book, you might be able to change that. The life source of an organisation - and it is the life source that generates sustainable profits - is its soul. Many organisations go through regular downsizing and this not only robs them of organisational memory, it kills the soul. It is about time that we look at the meaning in organisations which helps us to leave a legacy with our life work.

The author of my favourite book on consulting, Flawless Consulting has now written about how we act within our organisations and how we can be more effective and achieve sustainable profitability as well as creating organisations in which people want to work. He starts with the observation that we usually are asking the wrong questions and helps to identify more useful questions. This is a book close to my heart because, like with Reclaiming Higher Ground, it focuses on how we can create organisations which are healthy for us and which provide us with meaning for our lives. Block says that you need to: claim full citizenship (take full responsibility - no more tragedy of the commons!); continually develop yourself (with your full responsibility); understand that your boss hasn't got what you want (and so change your relationship with him/her); give up your personal ambition and finally look to the whole organisation/system. He also provides ideas on how to socially architect this new organisation. He dares to write about things that business leaders probably don't want to hear - but in today's reality, they had better listen; it is the only route to truly agile, sustainable business.

This is the best book we've found on the methodology. It gives you the basics and it gives you examples of how the methodology is used in different sectors and different cultures. Very approachable.

Solutions Focus is related to Appreciative Inquiry. Both methods grew out of research in the 60's and 70's on how language creates reality. The book is straightforward and SIMPLE. It provides a framework for action for individuals and organisations to follow to encourage and grow change. Instead of being mired in the problem focus we normally have, they use what I would call the appreciative eye to focus on what works well and how to do more of that. Discovering and using the resources we have, building upon them, step by step it encourages a focus of hope instead of the normal way of doing things. There are good examples too, for people who are new to the ideas. Interestingly it also uses some of the complexity ideas around emergent systems that Pascale discusses!

This is a collection of articles from international authors on appreciative, success-focused methods for change. Originally published through AMED (Organisations & People, the AMED journal or AMED newsletter), this is a collection of practical case studies and proven techniques for change from Solutions Focused coaching and group work to large group interventions. It includes some new and practical approaches such as using organisational constellations and using the results to frame the questions for a large group appreciative inquiry. We should declare our hand: it includes articles by one of our principles, Patricia Lustig.

This book is wonderful! It starts by helping you to identify the two types of thinking you have: analytical and flow thinking. Analytical thinking is useful for problems where there is one solution or where you have enough information to find a solution. Flow thinking is about creativity and is useful when you don't have enough information (which is most of the time). Helps you to live in the moment and although you slow down and concentrate, you will find that you actually get more done! After all, we have this life, now and in fact, only this moment. So let us do what we can, in this moment.

A truly amazing book! Some of these are plain common sense, some are wacky and some will truly change your life. Two especially strong suggestions that we liked: #39 (page 82) Come to your own rescue, "When you accept the idea that 'no one is coming' it is actually a very powerful moment, because it means that YOU are enough. No one needs to come. You can handle your problems yourself.." #91 (page 189) Exploit your weakness, it has you looking at your weaknesses objectively and working on how these might be made into a strength. A very uplifting and - yes - motivating book.

To be a good leader, one first has to be able to lead oneself. There are principles that must be adhered to. Covey and Co. have done research to identify what effective people do and what those principles are. We found it enormously useful and the type of book one reads once a year to remind oneself (it is so easy to forget when we get caught up in the daily grind) what is really important in life.

I read these two books in the order in which they were written and feel that both are very useful. Ever wondered why some people have all the luck and others don't? Ever wondered why bad things happen to some people all the time and other people don't seem to be so affected? Dyer suggests that the difference is that some people are open to the abundance in the universe, so they understand when the universe is sending them something and they accept it, the others don't. The books are quite American in style and there are parts that are rather "New Age" and have put some of my colleagues off a bit (these are around raising your vibrational levels). Stick with it, however, and you will finish up with great nuggets of gold for your own development. He recommends meditation - and in particular Japa meditation - as part of a programme to connect you to the present moment. Each chapter finishes with ideas that you can immediately put into practise. The books have helped to anchor me in the present moment and to anchor me in an abundant world. I can't recommend them highly enough.

Even consultants like us need to do marketing. This is the best book we've found so far on how one can market professional services. The step-by-step plan is foolproof (and we know, we've tried the foolish route too). It is basic, and probably all things you know, however, with the worksheets and the daily work plans, you get the help you need in order to motivate yourself to actually MAKE those cold calls you know you should.