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Out of Control – Kevin Kelly

“This book is about the marriage of the born and the made. By extracting the logical principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of building extremely complex systems, technicians are conjuring up contraptions that are at once both made and alive. This marriage between life and machines is one of convenience, because, in part, it has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it. That is, the more mechanical we make our fabricated environment, the more biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization.”

Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels -
Joseph Bragdon

“All of these companies [Nucor, Southwest Airlines, Toyota, Nokia, Stora Enso, Canon, Intel, 3M, and HP] have long had stewardship cultures rooted in systemic caring. They think and act like living communities that are integral to the larger living systems in which they exist – society, markets, and the biosphere. This conceptual framework is very different from the more traditional, mechanistic view that corporations are moneymaking machines that exist separate from society and the biosphere, both of which conventional economics views as ‘external’ to the legitimate concerns of business. …[My goal] is to distill the trends I have followed in management practices and other fields into a coherent and unified theory.”

Who Really Matters – Art Kleiner

“’The customer comes first’ is one of the three great lies of the modern corporation. The other two are: ‘We make our decisions on behalf of our shareholders’ and ‘Employees are our most important asset.’ …Of course, if organizations were really set up on behalf of these interests, then they would do a better job, by and large, in serving them. When organizations fail, people tend to assume that their leaders are inept, overwhelmed, or corrupt. But suppose instead that all organizations are doing precisely what they’re supposed to be doing. What, then, is their objective? Judging not from their rhetoric, but from their actual behavior and accomplishments, what purpose are most organizations seeking to fulfill? This book is an effort to answer that question.”

Creating WE – Judith Glaser

“While many people in my field [are] focusing on ‘fixing what [is] broken in companies, I found myself exploring what as working and how to create health. I discovered that when I guided clients on how to ‘remember what they already knew’ about creating environments poised for success, these executives miraculously remembered how to be Vital Leaders – and the business results that followed were astounding. … The principle behind what we [are] seeing and experiencing seemed to be simple: We are all connected. Even though the umbilical cord is cut at birth, our emotions and energy remain connected. We are connected through our families, organizations, and communities. We are connected through the beliefs we hold about the world. We are connected at the heart and at the head. When these connections are broken, what was a healthy, growth-oriented culture turns unhealthy and every member of the organization – every cell of the human organism – suffers.”

How the way we talk can change the way we work – Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

“This is a book about the possibility of extraordinary change in individuals and organizations. It locates an unexpected source of boundless energy to bring these changes into being. …if we want deeper understanding of the prospect of change, we must pay closer attention to our own powerful inclinations not to change. This attention may help us discover within ourselves the force and beauty of a hidden immune system, the dynamic process by which we tend to prevent change, by which we manufacture continuously the antigens of change. …our focus is on the deeper, underlying changes in the way individual and groups make meaning, rather than aiming for the immediate relief of symptoms or behavioral strategies to bring about short-term solutions.”

Leadership and the New Science –
Margaret Wheatley

“I like to think of this book as reminiscent of the early chart books used by explorers sailing in search of new lands. Those early maps and accompanying commentary were descriptive but not predictive, enticing but not fully revelatory. They pointed in certain directions, illuminated landmarks, warned of dangers, yet they included enough elusive references and blank sports to encourage explorations and discoveries by other people. …This book contains the charts of my first journeys into the territory of new science – those hypotheses and discoveries in biology, chemistry, and physics that challenge us to reshape our fundamental world view. … This new territory contained powerful images, metaphors, and ways of thinking that asked me to seek new ways of comprehending the issues that trouble organizations most: chaos, order, control, autonomy, structure, information, participation, planning and prediction.”

The Mind Map Book – Tony Buzan

"We are, as an evolutionary model, a mere 45,000 years old, and we now stand on the brink of a revolution that will change the course of human development. For the first time in the three and a half million year history of human intelligence, that very intelligence has realized that it can understand, analyze, and nurture itself. By applying itself to itself it can develop new ways of thinking that are far more flexible and powerful than the traditional modes of thought currently in use throughout the world."

Making up the Mind – Chris Frith

“Brain activity is not the same as mental experience...What the brain imaging experiments reveal so starkly is the seemingly unbridgeable gap between objective physical matter and subjective mental experience...We all read each other's minds all the time. How else are we able to exchange ideas and create culture?... We have direct contact with the physical world through our senses. But this mental world is private to each one of us... Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or the mental world, comes to us through our brain. But our brain's connection with the physical world of objects is no more direct than our brain's connection with the mental world of ideas. By hiding from us all the unconscious inferences that it makes, our brain creates the illusion that we have direct contact with objects in the physical world. And at the same time our brain creates the illusion that or own mental world is isolated and private...By seeing through these illusions created by our brain, we can begin to develop a science that explain how the brain creates the mind."

Entanglement - Amir D. Aezel

"This book tells the story of entanglement, a phenomenon in which to entities are inexorably linked no matter how far away from each other they may be. It is the story of the people who have spent lifetimes seeking evidence that such a bizarre effect - predicted by the quantum theory and brought to wide scientific attention by Einstein - is indeed an integral part of nature. As these scientists studied such effects, and produced definitive evidence that entanglement is a reality, they have also discovered other, equally perplexing, aspects of the phenomenon."

Why we believe what we believe -
Andrew Newberg, MD and Mark Robert Waldman

"Each year, thousands of cases of remarkable recoveries are described, and although such "miracles" are often attributed to the power of faith and belief, the majority of scientists are skeptical of such claims...Hundreds of mind-body experiments have been conducted - including placebo studies and research on the power of meditation and prayer - but few scientists have attempted to explain the underlying biology of belief...Fortunately, recent discoveries about the ways the brain creates memories, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions can provide a new template with which to examine the how and why of belief...This understanding can then help us to discern the difference between destructive and constructive beliefs, skills that are essential if we are to adequately address important individual, interpersonal, and global problems."

The Executive Brain - Elkhonon Goldberg

"This book is about leadership. The frontal lobes are to the brain what a conductor is to an orchestra, a general to an army, the chief executive officer to a corporation. They coordinate and lead other neutral structures in concerted action...This book is about motivation, drive, and vision. Motivation, drive, foresight, and clear vision of one's goals are central to success in any walk of life...This book is about self-awareness of others. Our ability to accomplish our goals depends on our ability to critically appraise our own actions and the actions of those around us...This book is about talent and success. We readily recognize literary talent, musical talent, and athletic talent. But in a complex society such as ours a different talent comes to the fore, the leadership talent. Of all the forms of talent, the ability to lead, to compel other human beings to rally behind you, is the most mysterious and the most profound...This book is about society and history. All complex systems have certain features in common, and by learning about one such a system we learn about the others...Above all, this book is about the brain, the mysterious organ that is part of us, that makes us who we are, that endows us with our powers and weighs us down with our weaknesses, the microcosm, the last frontier."

Wider than the sky - Gerald M Edelman, M.D., Ph.D.

"We all know what consciousness is: it is what you lose when you fall into a deep dreamless sleep and what you regain when you wake up...consciousness is utterly dependent on the brain...[it] is a process, not a thing...the process of consciousness is a dynamic accomplishment of the distributed activities of populations of neurons in many different areas of the brain. That an area may be essential or necessary for consciousness does not mean it is sufficient. Furthermore, a given neuron may contribute to conscious activity at one moment and not at the next...One outstanding property is that consciousness is unitary or integrated, at least in healthy individuals...Yet this unitary scene will change and differentiate according to outside stimuli or inner thoughts to yet another scene. The number of such differentiated scenes seems endless, yet each is unitary. The scene is not just wider than the sky, it can contain many disparate elements - sensations, perceptions, images, memories, thought, emotions, aches, pains, vague feeling and so on..."

Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio

"The main subject in Descartes' Error is the relation between emotion and reason...that emotion was in the loop of reason, and that emotion could assist the reasoning process rather than necessarily disturb it...To be sure, on certain occasions, emotions can be a substitute for reason. The emotional action program we call fear can get most human beings out of danger, in short order, with little or no help from reason...In effect, in some circumstances, too much thinking may be far less advantageous than no thinking at all. That is the beauty of how emotion has functioned throughout evolution: it allows the possibility of making living beings act smartly without having to think smartly...Reasoning does what emotions do but achieves it knowingly. Reasoning gives us the option of thinking smartly before we act smart, and a good thing too: it is apparent that the emotions alone can solve many-but not all-the problems posed by our complex environment and that, on occasion, the solutions offered by emotion are actually counterproductive."

On intelligence - Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee

"The question of intelligence is the last great terrestrial frontier of science very. You are your brain. If you want to understand why you feel the way you do, how you perceive the world, why you make the mistakes, how you are able to be creative, why music and art are inspiring, indeed what it is to be human, then you need to understand the brain. In addition, a successful theory of intelligence and brain function will have large societal benefits, and not just in helping us cure brain-related diseases. We will be able to build genuinely intelligent machines...intelligent machines will arise from a new set of principles about the nature of intelligence. As such, they will help us accelerate our knowledge of the world, help us explore the universe, and make the world safer. And along the way, a large industry will be created."

The mind and the Brain -
Jeffery M. Schwartz, M.D., and Sharon Begley

"The implications of directed neuroplasticity combined with quantum physics cast new light on the question of humankind's place, and role, in nature. At its core, the new physics combined with the emerging neuroscience suggest that the natural world evolves through an interplay between two causal processes. The first includes the physical processes we are all familiar with-electricity, streaming, gravity pulling. The second includes the contents of our consciousness, including volition. The importance of this second process cannot be overstated, for it allows human thoughts to make a difference in the evolution of physical events."

A General Theory of Love - Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

"The brain's ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live immersed in unseen forces and silent messages that shape our destinies. As individuals and as a culture, our chance for happiness depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves-invisibly, improbably, inexorably - around love. From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body's physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Love makes us who we are, and who we can become."