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THE THERAPIST PSYCHOLOGIST BOOK STORE
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Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change By Don Edward BeckChristopher Cowan ( Wiley-Blackwell )
Release Date: 2005-08-08
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $42.00
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Product Description
Spiral Dynamics introduces a new model for plotting the enormous economic and commercial shifts that are making contemporary business practice so complex and apparently fragmented. Focusing on cutting-edge leadership, management systems, processes, procedures, and techniques, the authors synthesize changes such as:
- Increasing cultural diversity.
- Powerful new social responsibility initiatives.
- The arrival of a truly global marketplace.
This is an inspiring book for managers, consultants, strategists, and leaders planning for success in the business world in the 21st century.
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 State of The Art Sociology
As CEO Coach, Poet and author of a leadership book that helps leaders learn how to unleash the genius of teams and corporations, I feel this book is a must read. It help leaders understand the nature of the cultures and societies they work within. Paul David Walker Unleashing Genius: Leading Yourself, Teams and Corporations
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Makes sense out of things that didn't make sense
The model presented about how the paradigms of thinking and how value memes develop over time in a person, organization, or society are brilliantly insightful. This book should be required reading for anyone running a company or organization of any size. The insights that can be gleaned are significant (at least in the lines of development in which one if far enough along oneself).
This is not at all an "easy" book to read. It takes time and thinking, and is probably best read in parallel with a few other people and discussed regularly along the way. I read this book along with another CEO, and a PhD psychologist who specializes in working with family-owned businesses.
--Lee
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 A New Way of Understanding the World
It may not be the "answer to everything" but Spiral Dynamics helps to put a context around why people act in certain ways when presented with certain life conditions. Using the theory of memetics (idea viruses), spiral describes the evolution of humans as a progression from one value system to another along a double helix spiral. Pitched to those in management or leadership, Spiral Dynamics offers insights as to why some people need traditional or hierarchical or ordered or opportunistic or caring or project based workplaces depending on their value meme. The text can be stilted and academic at times and the introduction is confusing, however there are some great insights and well worth reading if you are interested in finding the answers to everything! Pity the colour plates from the hardcover were not replicated in the paperback seeing how Spiral Dynamics relies on the use of colour descriptors.
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Brilliant Idea ( zatavu )
I first heard of Spiral Dynamics when I went to hear Don Beck speak at the Dallas Philosopher's Forum. He was one of the worst speakers I ever heard -- but his ideas were so incredible, so brilliant, that they shined through the poverty of his delivery. When I then went out to buy the book, I encountered the same problem: brilliant ideas, poor delivery. But the ideas are so good, it is work struggling your way through this book just to get the ideas.
The idea is this: thinking and societies exist at different levels of complexity, with new forms of psychoosocial complexity emerging as lower levels become oppressive. It fits well the latest complex systems paradigm in science that takes into account emergence, information, time and process, and fractal geometry. More, it maps extremely well on to the emergentist theory of time developed by J.T. Fraser in books such as "Time, the Familiar Stranger" and "Time, Conflict, and Human Values" and in Frederick Turner's latest book "Natural Religion". The nested hierarchy. evolutionary, emergentist view of nature is THE new paradigm. This and Fraser's works are excellent introductions to these ideas.
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 The Emperor Has No Clothes
A very interesting developmental theory taken WAY to far. The ideas expressed here could have been presented as a helpful extension of the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow and others. Instead, they are framed as comprehensive theory of morality itself, marketed to managers (!) and consultants (!!), as 'leadership lit' no less. It's as if Nietzsche wrote "how-to" books for his developmentally superior ubermensch.
However, the authors have an ace up their sleeve. Spiral Dynamics defines two tiers of human development and pretty much anyone who agrees with the theory is automatically classified as a 'tier two spiral wizard.' Pretty cool- but those who read The Emperors New Clothes as a child might feel a bit uneasy about all of this. It turns out, however, that they feel this because they are still "first tier." Similarly, fans of the work of Karl Popper could see this internal dismissal of external criticisms as the surest sign of non-falsifiable oogy-boogy flim-flam, but again we are assured that that is not the case here. We are not actually bad for thinking this way- just developmentally limited. We are destined to live in the clutches of the 'mean green meme' in the hope of someday bowing to the superior functionality of the philosopher kings and their consulting affiliates.
And kings they are! It turns out there is a heck of a political agenda here. "Wizards," it seems, are instantly able to see solutions to systemic problems- and they need not take seriously the niggling and limited opinions of the lesser-tiered, except to figure out how to win them over. They are "big-picture" sorts, again like Nietzsche's supermen, busy moving the universe forward. They have a duty to run things in this chaotic world. Call it the "Turquoise Man's Burden." You see, these "Wizards" inherently tend to know best and to question their judgment is to betray an almost endearing naiveté. To point out that this is essentially what Plato had in mind when he wrote The Republic 2300 years ago, would, I suspect, be a faux pas. While the idea has yet to really work -and has led to more than a few revolutions- apparently its time has yet again come. From this standpoint, it is interesting that about half of this "developmental theory" is devoted to techniques for shilling ideas to the lesser-tiered.
As someone who grew up in Boulder, Colorado all I can think is that this functional superiority must surely account for the absolutely stunning moral, institutional and financial successes of the city's Integral Institute, which set out to be a sort of "Mensa" for all the lonely "spiral wizards". That it all snowballed into lawsuits and acrimony is only a sign of the sheer incomprehensibility of their greatness.
The bottom line: Much of the developmental theory is actually really good but absolutely ruined by the decision to conflate it with self-help pabulum for the self-righteous and cultish. Two-star stuff.
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Addiction
