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Most of our communities are fragmented and at odds within themselves. Businesses, social services, education, and health care each live within their own worlds. The same is true of individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. What keeps this from changing is that we are trapped in an old and tired conversation about who we are. If this narrative does not shift, we will never truly create a common future and work toward it together. What Peter Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation. How is community built? How does the transformatio...
" We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "
Block presents models of stewardship, both for entire companies and for individuals, to produce reforms in such areas as human resource practices, performance appraisal, and the role of staff groups.
Modern culture’s worship of “how-to” pragmatism has turned us into instruments of efficiency and commerce—but we’re doing more and more about things that mean less and less. We constantly ask “how? and still struggle to find purpose and act on what matters. Instead of acting on what we know to be of importance, we wait for bosses to change, we seek the latest fad, we invest in one more degree. Asking how keeps us safe—instead of being led by our hearts into uncharted territory, we keep our heads down and stick to the rules. But we are gaining the world and losing our souls. Peter Block puts the “how-to” craze in perspective and presents a guide to the difficult and life-granting journey of bringing what we know is of personal value into an indifferent or even hostile corporate and cultural landscape. He raises our awareness of the trade-offs we’ve made in the name of practicality and expediency, and offers hope for a way of life in which we’re motivated not by what “works,” but by the things that truly matter in life—idealism, intimacy, depth and engagement.
Don't venture into the consulting field without this essential Fieldbook & Companion! Following on the heels of the best-selling Flawless Consulting, Second Edition comes The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion. Whether you work as a consultant or you work with consultants, this relentlessly practical guide will be your best friend as you discover how consulting influences your business- and real life-decisions and those of others. The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion is packed with: Sample scenarios Case studies Client-consultant dialogues Hands-on tools Action plans Implementation checklists "Wow! A companion a business owner can't be without! The insights of 30 consultants the caliber of Peter Block is priceless." --Sue Mosby, principal, CDFM2 Architecture Inc. "This book is a companion piece for both the desktop and bedside of those who do consulting full time or in their role as leader. I plan to keep this book close to me to both guide and inspire my work." --Phil Harkins, president, Linkage, Inc.
Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new narrative, a shift in our thinking and speaking. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place...
Peter Koestenbaum and Peter Block offer you a new perspective forviewing the workplace through the lens of philosophy so that youmay have a better understanding of how to reclaim your freedom andaccountability and encourage the same in others. They provide aradical new approach to your work-a-day life that will bring truemeaning and power to your work. Freedom and Accountability at Work offers you the information youneed to: * Gain strength and meaning by transforming your thinking on howyou view anxiety, doubt, death, and guilt * Find new ways to bring spiritual and ethical values into yourworkplace * Engage in profound change that will help you overcome cynicismthat comes from superficial change * Replace your loss of organizational loyalty and safety with asense of freedom and accountability "Both Koestenbaum and Block are such passionate men who bringtogether what we all seek in our work life-meaning, insight, andhumanness. Bless them for this book." --Joyce DeShano, board chair, Ascension Health
Why do we make things? Why do we choose the emotionally and physically demanding work of bringing new objects into the world with creativity and skill? Why does it matter that we make things well? What is the nature of work? And what is the nature of a good life? This January, whether you're honing your craft or turning your hand to a new skill, discover the true value in what it means to be a craftsman in a mass-produced world. Part memoir, part polemic, part philosophical reflection, this is a book about the process of creation. For woodworker Peter Korn, the challenging work of bringing something new and meaningful into the world through one's own efforts is exactly what generates authent...
There was life before the fall. 1989 was a year of astonishing and rapid change: the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and an end to an entire way of life for millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. Bloc Life collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals a rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption. In fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as 'perfectly ordinary' and even hanker for the 'security' that it offered. From political leaders, athletes and pop stars, to cooks, miners and cosmonauts, the stories collected in Bloc Life evoke the moods, preoccupations and experiences of a world that vanished almost overnight.