You can keep updated on my reading recommendations by visiting my Linked In page and clicking on the ‘View Full Profile’ button.
21 April 2010 Michael Sandel was the 2009 BBC Reith lecturer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kt7rg and has since written an introduction to moral philosophy entitled ‘Justice’. The book is bang up-to-date using as an example of moral indignation the public disgust about bailed-out bankers awarding themselves outrageously large bonuses. Sandel explores the meaning of justice as welfare, freedom and virtue and concludes his book by arguing – as he does in his Reith lectures – for a reinvigoration of the idea of citizenship. An interesting read providing a moral compass during the current UK general election debates.
4 February 2010 I have been reading a lot recently but not posting anything here! On the recommendation of a participant in the Swedish Mission Council organisational learning support initiative I bought Stephen Gill’s ‘Developing a Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations’. It’s interesting and practical but I was relieved to find that it wasn’t “the book I nearly wrote myself”! However, its great to see more material on organisational learning that is directly targeted at the non-profit organisation.
22 September 2009 I have just finished reading ‘The Starfish and the Spider’ by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom which was recommended to me. It’s a pop management book, very readable and entertaining but one that doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its subtitle to examine ‘The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organisations’. In fact it isn’t really about leaderless organisations – its more about decentralised organisations with supportive, catalytic, low profile leaders – and hence is hardly revolutionary. The leaderless ‘organisations’ – starfish organisations – that the book does shine an interesting light on, are more in the category of self-organised movements accountable primarily to their own members. What the authors have to say about these is interesting but it is difficult to see how their ‘rules’ could be applied to organisations such as NGOs that need to be seen to be accountable to a wide range of external stakeholders. Nevertheless the book had enough challenge to make me look at organisations from a new perspective and that alone makes it worth recommending.
My concern about climate change and my desire to reduce my carbon footprint has led me to two very different but equally inspiring books. The first, by the Scottish environmental activist, Alastair McIntosh, is entitled ‘Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition’. It covers the science and politics well but its main contribution is in exploring our ‘addictive consumer mentality’. It is unusual for this kind of book to use examples from Scotland so that is an added attraction for me but McIntosh has an engaging writing style (even if he tends to overuse the exclamation mark) and speaks from the heart. The second book, ‘The Transition Handbook’ by Rob Hopkins is more of a practical manual on how to move on from the guilt and anxiety that discussions on climate change usually engender to ‘developing a positive vision … to create a more self reliant existence’. I live in a suburban area of a small town on the east coast of Scotland and rely on international travel for my livelihood so my options for reducing my carbon footprint and ‘being the change I want to see in the world’ often seem limited to me. But each book, in its own way, has provided hope and ideas for manageable, even radical, change.
A couple of books that have provided some interesting insights into the application of Web 2.0 are Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (subtitled ‘The Power of Organizing without Organizations’) and We-Think (subtitled Mass innovation, not mass production) by Charles Leadbeater. Both examine collaborative working using web technology but from different directions and have a characteristically positive and somewhat overoptimistic view of what Web 2.0 can deliver. Clay Shirky’s book uses some lively examples to demonstrate the political and consumer power of collaborative organisation of using blogs, MySpace and Twitter. Leadbeater’s book, using some fascinating examples from the nonprofit world (among them the Grameen Bank, the human genome project, WRVS and the Jubliee 2000 campaign), has greater ambitions for Web 2.0: arguing that FaceBook and MySpace can lead to a more open society. Hmmm – not if all the content that people post in their FaceBook pages becomes the property of FaceBook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg. There’s a good introduction to We Think on You Tube
INTRAC, through its Praxis Programme, has produced some excellent publications on capacity building and civil society strengthening but what has been missing is a book addressing the practicalities of capacity building – until now! This gap has been filled admirably by Brenda Lipson and Martina Hunt in their recent book ‘Capacity Building Framework: A values-based programming guide’ Those familiar with INTRAC’s courses (including the one I teach on ‘Organisational Development’ will recognise some of the conceptual frameworks used in this book: the three-circle model, the onion skin model and the organisational life cycle. What sets this book apart from the very few others written about capacity building in Civil Society organisations is the ‘values’ perspective used throughout. As an introductory guide for budding capacity builders or a useful point of reflection for those more experienced this book provides some very useful materials in an easily assimilated format.
I have recently been re-reading parts of Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. The subtitle ‘How mass collaboration changes everything’ gives an idea of what this book is about. It examines how collaboration rather than competition is driving innovation in the development of web-based goods and services. Using some fascinating examples ranging from the development of Scorecard to collate public data to ‘name and shame’ polluters to ‘mashing’ data on websites to enable people to trace loved ones following hurricane Katrina using the Katrina PeopleFinder Project, the authors demonstrate what is possible with web technology when people take an open, collaborative approach.
Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ – an expose of the US exploitation of natural and human-created disasters as a means of creating new market opportunities for their private sector corporations. I have only started this but already I feel incensed at the self-serving complicity between politicians and the corporations that benefit from their decisions. NGOs have a lot to fear from Klein’s revelations as disaster response (which has historically been a focus of humanitarian NGOs) becomes increasingly seen as a profitable opportunity to exploit those in a vulnerable psychological state rather than a situation requiring caring and compassionate provision of assistance.
Margaret Wheatley‘s ‘Finding Our Way’ – a collection of wonderfully perceptive and humane articles by one of my favourite analysts of organisations and their development. Wheatley has a great ability to challenge conventional views of organisations in ways that require us to question what we learn as ‘common sense’.
