Books

This groundbreaking book offers leaders a way to determine what theories, models, and tools best meet the needs of their organizations. Authors and organizational consultants John P. Forman and Laurel A. Ross know leaders are awash in business theory, often coming from well-thumbed bestsellers. But how do you match promising theories to real people and circumstances? Using the insights of Integral Theory, particularly Ken Wilber’s AQAL framework, the authors provide a simple, but elegant framework that appreciates and engages a wide range of leadership theories and techniques. Four major leadership styles emerge: the Impulsive, Diplomatic, Achiever, and Pluralistic approaches. The authors describe the presuppositions, characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of each are discussed using a variety of real-life examples of individual leaders and organizations. Forman and Ross propose an emerging Integral perspective and suggest Integral modes of professional development, change management, and teamwork. Ultimately, the Integral perspective gives leaders the insight and flexibility to use a range of resources to meet organizational needs in a rapidly changing world. (SUNY Press, 2013)

This little book seeks to restore some of the innate ethical and moral “truth” of who we are in a practical and clear-headed way. I deeply believe that our spiritual core is speaking to us all the time, if we can have the ears to listen. The “truth” of who we are lives in the quiet spaces of our interior and as we are able to calm the distractions, we can know our own truth. This is a tremendously important thing to do, given the current state of the world. In all the history of humanity, we have never seen the opportunity for so much destruction and so much forward movement all in the same events. The issues we see arising in the world are all evidence of our need as a culture to rise to their challenge. We need to grow our capacity to separate ourselves from the “story” of the world we live in.

This book is a kind of primer to begin that work. Laurel Ross takes the reader through five gateways of learning: fear, scarcity, dishonesty, death and blame to show them how to convert all that darkness into positive “truth” about their own essential nature. This is all under the banner of choosing love over fear and gives muscle to otherwise soft beliefs. The reader will take away many tools, which will enable them to deconstruct the pain and hardship they see in their lives and convert those hardships into joy.