100 BOOKS TO PREPARE BETTER FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Dear friends,

Here is a list of my favorite 100 books that give a better perspective for us about the 21st century. This comprehensive list covers diverse fields such as business, leadership, engineering, arts, health, information technologies, education, science, and ecology. This list can help you in your brainstorming about Mini-Project 2. I recommend you to skim through the list and select your top ten books that you intend to buy and read.

21.ST CENTURY BUSINESS

Business 2010: Trends and Technologies to Shape Our WorldIan Pearson and Michael Lyons. Spiro Press. 2003.
Chaotics: An Agenda for Business and Society in the 21st CenturyGeorges Anderla, Anthony Dunning, and Simon Forge. Praeger. 1997.
The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and YourJobOded Shenkar. Wharton School Publishing. 2004.
The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-MaterialsRichard W. Oliver. McGraw-Hill. 2000.
The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their ConsequencesLouis Uchitelle. Knopf. 2006.
Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business WebsDon Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy. Harvard Business School Press. 2000.
The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your BusinessRolf Jensen. McGraw-Hill. 1999.
The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a StageB. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. Harvard Business School Press. 1999.
Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for InnovationStefan H. Thomke. Harvard Business School Press. 2003.
Getting To The Better Future: A Matter of Conscious Choosing: How Business Can Lead the Way to New PossibilitiesJohn E. Renesch. New Business Books. 2000.
Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism: Seven New trends That Will Transform How You Work, Live and InvestPatricia Aburdene. Hampton Roads.
The New Rules of Corporate Conduct: Rewriting the Social CharterIan Wilson. Quorum. 2000.
A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion, and Values in the Workplace Ian I. Mitroff and Elizabeth A. Denton. Jossey-Bass. 1999.
What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature Tachi Kiuchi and Bill Shireman. Berrett-Koehler. 2002.

21. CENTURY INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius Michael Michalko. Ten Speed Press. 1998
The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox A Complete Course in the Art of Creating Solutions to Problems of Any Kind Richard Fobes. Solutions Through Innovation. 1993.
Creativity and Innovation For ManagersBrian Clegg. Butterworth-Heinemann. 1999.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. HarperCollins. 1996.
The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Identifying and Mastering Your Exceptional GiftsMary-Elaine Jacobsen. Ballantine. 1999.
The Hidden Intelligence: Innovation Through IntuitionSandra Weintraub. Butterworth-Heinemann. 1998.
The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and CulturesFrans Johansson. Harvard Business School Press. 2004.
New Ideas About New Ideas: Insights on Creativity from the World's Leading InnovatorsShira P. White with G. Patton Wright. Perseus Publishing. 2002.
The Seeds of Innovation: Cultivating the Synergy That Fosters New Ideasby Elaine Dundon. AMACOM. 2002.

21. CENTURY ECONOMY

Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economyby Hazel Henderson. Kumarian Press. 1999.
Building A Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfareby Hazel Henderson. Paperback. Berrett-Koehler. 1996.
A Civil Economy: Transforming the Marketplace in the Twenty-First Century (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) by Severyn Bruyn. University of Michigan Press. 2000.
Digital Economics: How Information Technology Has Transformed Business Thinkingby Richard B. McKenzie. Praeger. 2003.
Eco-Economy: Building a New Economy for the Environmental Ageby Lester R. Brown. W.W. Norton. 2001. 224 pages
It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Businessby Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis. Crown Publishing Group. 2003. 288 pages.

21. CENTURY EDUCATION

The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University by Frank H.T. Rhodes. Cornell University Press. 2001.
Cyberschools: An Education Renaissance by Glenn R. Jones. Foreword by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Jones Digital Century. 1997.
Education for the Twenty-First Centuryby William H. Boyer. Caddo Gap Press. 2002.
Preparing Schools And School Systems For The 21st Centuryby Frank Withrow with Harvey Long and Gary Marx. American Association of School Administrators. 1999.
Preparing Students For The 21st Century by Donna Uchida with Marvin Cetron and Floretta McKenzie. American Association of School Administrators. 1996.
The University In Transformation: Global Perspectives on the Futures of the Universityedited by Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley. Bergin & Garvey/Greenwood Publishing Group. 2000.

21. CENTURY ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY

The Earth’s Biosphere: Education, Dynamics, and Changeby Vaclav Smil. MIT Press. 2002.
Ecological Security: An Evolutionary Perspective on Globalizationby Dennis Clark Pirages and Theresa Manley DeGeest. Rowman and Littlefield. 2004.
Economics for Collaborative Environmental Management: Renegotiating the Commons by Graham R. Marshall. Earthscan. 2005.
State of the World 2005: Redefining Global Securityby The Worldwatch Institute. W.W. Norton. 2005.
Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow: Shaping the Next Industrial Revolution edited by Robert Olson and David Rejeski. Island Press. 2005.
One Planet, Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment by the United Nations Environment Programme. 2005.
Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of the Climateby William F. Ruddiman. Princeton University Press. 2005.
State of the World 2006: Special Focus: China and India by The Worldwatch Institute. W. W. Norton & Company. 2006.
Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options by Jefferson W. Tester, et al. MIT Press. 2005.
Vital Signs 2005: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future edited by Linda Starke, the Worldwatch Institute. W.W. Norton & Company. 2005.

21. CENTURY CULTURE

Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century by Richard A. Slaughter. Praeger. 1995. 232 pages.
47. Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, and Knowledge by Wendell Bell. Transaction Publishers. 2003.
Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era. Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society by Wendell Bell. Transaction Publishers. 1996.
A View From The Year 3000: A Ranking of the 100 Most Influential Persons of All Timeby Michael H. Hart. Poseidon Press. 1999.
A Brief History of the Smileby Angus Trumble. Basic Books.
All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilizationby Walter Truett Anderson. Westview Press. 2001.
The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming Our Lives and Shaping Human Destinyby Michael G. Zey. McGraw-Hill. 2000.

21. CENTURY HEALTH

Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution by Ronald Bailey. Prometheus Books. 2005.
The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mindby Richard Restak. Rodale Press. 2003.
The Secret Life of the Brainby Richard Restak. Dana Press/Joseph Henry Press. 2001.
21st Century Health Care In Latin America And The Caribbean: Prospects For Achieving Health For Alledited by Clement Bezold, Julio Frenk, and Shaun McCarthy. Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF). 1998.

21. CENTURY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Beyond Mobile: People, Communications and Marketing in a Mobilized World by Mats Lindgren, Jörgen Jedbratt, and Erika Svensson. Palgrave. 2002.
Digital Futures: Living in a Dot-Com Worldedited by James Wilsdon. Earthscan. 2001.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everythingby James Gleick. Pantheon. 1999.
Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Usby Benjamin Radford. Prometheus Books. 2003.
Planet Broadbandby Rouzbeh Yassini. Cisco Press. 2004.
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolutionby Howard Rheingold. Perseus Publishing. 2002.
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture edited by John Rodzvilla. Perseus Publishing. 2002.

21. CENTURY MANAGEMENT

Building on the Promise of Diversity: How We Can Move to the Next Level in Our Workplaces, Our Communities, and Our Societyby R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. American Management Association. 2005.
The Dance Of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizationsby Peter Senge et al. Currency-Doubleday. 1999.
The Forward-Focused Organizationby Stephen C. Harper. AMACOM. 2001.
Free Market Fusion: How Entrepreneurs and Nonprofits Create 21st Century Successby Glenn R. Jones. Cyber Publishing Group. 1999.
The Future Of Leadershipedited by Warren Bennis, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Thomas G. Cummings. Jossey-Bass. 2001.
The Infinite Resource: Creating and Leading the Knowledge Enterpriseedited by William E. Halal. Jossey-Bass. 1998.
Managing Crises Before They Happen: What Every Executive and Manager Needs to Know About Crisis Managementby Ian I. Mitroff, with Gus Anagnos. AMACOM. 2001.
The New Management: Democracy and Enterprise Are Transforming Organizations by William E. Halal. Paperback. Berrett-Koehler. 1996.
The Organization Of The Future edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard. Foreword by Peter F. Drucker. Jossey-Bass. 1997.
Shaping The Adaptive Organization: Landscapes, Learning, and Leadership in Volatile Timesby William E. Fulmer. AMACOM. 2000
Creating Your Future: Five Steps To The Life Of Your Dreamsby Dave Ellis. Houghton Mifflin. 1998.
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. BasicBooks. 1997.
The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs and Transforming Community Systemsby Gwendolyn Hallsmith. New Society Publishers. 2003.
Strategic Thinking And The New Science: Planning in the Midst of Chaos, Complexity, and Changeby T. Irene Sanders. Free Press. 1998.
The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy edited by Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso. Center for Transatlantic Relations, the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. 2006.

21. CENTURY SCIENCE AND INNOVATION

The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the Worldby Jeremy Rifkin. Tarcher/Putnam. 1998.
Earth System Analysis for Sustainability edited by Hans Joachim et al. The MIT Press. 2004.
The Genomics Age: How DNA Technology is Transforming the Way We Live and Who We Areby Gina Smith. AMACOM. 2004.
The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endlessby John D. Barrow. Pantheon Books. 2005.
Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnologyby J. Storrs Hall. Foreword by K. Eric Drexler. Prometheus Books. 2005.
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Centuryedited by John Brockman. Vintage Books. 2002.
Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics, and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our Worldby Douglas Mulhall. Prometheus Books. 2002.
Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Technology Will Transform Business in the 21st Centuryby James Canton. Hay House. 1999.
Wondergenes: Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Societyby Maxwell J. Mehlman. Indiana University Press. 2003.

21. CENTURY GLOBALIZATION AND VALUES

Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence. 10 Steps to the Universal Humanby Barbara Marx Hubbard. Walsch Books. 2001.
The Future of Values: 21st-Century Talksedited by Jérôme Bindé. Berghahn Books/UNESCO Publishing. 2004.
The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Societyby Amitai Etzioni. Basic Books. 1996.
The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolutionby Walter Truett Anderson. St. Martin's Press. 2003.
Planetary Citizenship: Your Values, Beliefs and Actions Can Shape a Sustainable Worldby Hazel Henderson and Daisaku Ikeda. Middleway Press. 200 pages. 2004.
Capitalizing on Career Chaos: Bringing Creativity and Purpose to Your Work and Lifeby Helen Harkness. Davies-Black Publishing. 2005.
The Future Workforce: The 21st-Century Transformation of Leaders, Managers, and Employees Irving Buchen Rowman & Littlefield Education. 2005.
Building Sustainable Societies: A Blueprint for a Post-Industrial Worldedited by Dennis C. Pirages. M.E. Sharpe. 1996.
Global Trends and Global Governanceedited by Paul Kennedy, Dirk Messner, and Franz Nuscheler. Pluto Press. 2002.
High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Themby J.F. Rischard. Basic Books. 2002.
Keys To The 21st Centuryedited by Jérôme Bindé. UNESCO Publishing/Berghahn Books. 2001. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan. Blackwell Publishers. 1996.
The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs and the World Café Community. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2005.

A Self-Reflection Tool-kit for Mini-Project 1: Personal Excellence Plan

Dear Colleagues,

I will now attach for you a great resource for your Mini-Project 1, “What Color is Your Parachute?”. Two flagship monthly magazines in leadership development, Personal Excellence and Executive Excellence (edited by Ken Shelton) have developed a toolkit for self-reflection and personal development: “The Personal Excellence Plan”. This toolkit includes a wealth of resources and a family of tools and exercises to help you grow and progress in your career and life in the following areas: Service, Physical, Mental, Professional, Financial, Social/Emotional and Spiritual/Character.

The Personal Excellence Plan has five unique features that makes it really effective:
1. The Personal Excellence Plan honors your dreams, aspirations, faith, intuition, feelings, and emotions.
2. The Personal Excellence Plan integrates your personal life with your family and professional contribution.
3. The Personal Excellence Plan bridges vision and action.
4. The Personal Excellence Plan enables you to find harmony and
synergy among the different roles and dimensions of your life.
5. The Personal Excellence Plan encourages a balanced, holistic,
value-based, principled approach to life.

Thus, I recommend you to go over this great resource and toolkit provided by Executive Excellence; the leading newsletter/magazine in the field of leadership. Feel free to print it and complete the exercises in it. This will help you tremendously in your self-reflection, self-evaluation, job application, and in constructing your own personal strategic plans.

Here is the resource; just click: http://www.eep.com/Merchant//newsite/pep.pdf

Adventures in Complexity

Prof. Holbrook from Columbia University has written excellent article titled "Adventures in Complexity: An Essay on Dynamic Open Complex Adaptive Systems, Butterfly Effects, Self-Organizing Order, Coevolution, the Ecological Perspective, Fitness Landscapes, Market Spaces, Emergent Beauty at the Edge of Chaos, and All That Jazz". I recommend you to skim through the article to gain a better appreciation of the issues of complexity, fractal geometry, chaos theory, butterfly effect, DOCASs (Dynamic Open Complex Adaptive Systems), deep ecology, self-organization, emergence, fitness landscapes, and emergent beauty at the edge of chaos. These issues have significant implications for management and organizations in the 21st century. Click on the address below to access the article:
http://www.amsreview.org/articles/holbrook06-2003.pdf

I hope you enjoy and become immersed in this book-long- article as much as I did. This can be a greatly rewarding intellectual adventure for you this weekend! Best, Fahri

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

An introduction to the world of Web 2.0 and Digital Ethnography

Workshop and Brainstorming Session: Leadership and the Global Agenda in the 21st Century

Here is a summary of some of the key points we have discussed and brainstormed together in our workshop last time.

Global Complex Problems

· Half of the people, nearly 3 billion people live on less than 2$ a day.
· Nearly 1 billion people entered the 21st century illiterate; unable to read a book or sign their names.
· 1.3 billion have no access to clean water. 3 billion have no access to sanitation.
· Every 30 seconds; an African child dies of malaria. More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day. 300 million are children.
· Every 3.6 seconds, a person dies of starvation.
· Almost 100.000 people die worldwide every day from preventable diseases and because they lack the most essential needs such as water, food, shelter, sanitation and education.
· Recently; there have been bloody conflicts and wars continuing in 56 different places in the world. Afghanistan, Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Kosovo, Macedonia, Middle East, Nigeria, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Uganda.. Floods of tears and blood still flowing in many parts of the world.

In the 21st century, our world is facing complex global scale problems: War, religious intolerance, conflict, violence, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, pollution, crime, theft, fraud, murder, corruption, immortality, child abuse, human rights violation, oppression, inequality, injustice, nuclear weapons, and global terror among others.

At the Global Compact Leaders Summit on 24th of June, 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: “Let us be true global citizens. Let us not rest until we have truly succeeded in bringing positive change into the lives of people, and laid the foundations for peaceful, well-functioning, sustainable societies throughout the world… Rarely has there been a moment in recent history when it has been so critical for all of us to protect our common space, building on what unites us. Again, I ask, if not us, then who?”…

A Global Agenda for Positive Universal Values for the 21st Century

The need for universal common values such as peace, dialog, cooperation, compassion is recurring themes in not only in educational and non-profit organizations but also for corporations and businesses. Today’s organizations are faced with more complexities, competition, and change than at any other time in history. To effectively cope, leaders in today’s organizations need to focus on ethics, social responsibility, collaboration, chaos, innovation, creativity, adaptation, flexibility, system thinking, relationships, and leadership.

An Emerging Paradigm based on Global Consciousness

Towards the 21st century, humanity is moving in the direction of global consciousness based on shared values. This emerging paradigm is crucial in forming a world of peace, democracy, human rights, ethics, multiculturalism and dialog. Below is a list of common global values that affirm the unity of all being; affirm the interconnectedness of all, and affirm a new bottom line of love, caring, and compassion. This list indicates an emerging global consciousness based on a set of shared values:

Economic and social justice
Golden rule: Treating others as we wish them to treat us
Respect for life, freedom and human rights
Nature-friendly ways of life and ecological consciousness
Honesty and integrity
Peace and non-violence
Multiculturalism, democracy and civic education
Tolerance, dialog and respect for diversity
Cross-cultural understanding and interfaith dialog
Cooperation, compassion and charity
Global citizenship and planetary stewardship
Self-discipline
Treating people equally without bias
Sincerity, friendship, love and sharing
Self-sacrifice, devotion and idealism
Serving humanity at large
Universal ethics, and global concern
Arts, conscious communication, reflection and conscious education,
The power of the human spirit and prayer
Spiritual practices, inner work, transcendence
Community service and social responsibility,
Inner happiness & place of the individual in the world

Academic World and Scholarship: Towards a Common Set of Values and Consciousness?

The organizational literature or scholarship has also been keeping up with this emerging trend. A literature review and a preliminary analysis reveal the emergence of a set of new approaches, models, theories, schools, and movements pointing toward an emerging global paradigm. This global paradigm is represented by the following value based approaches, movements and models:

Corporate Social Responsibility http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/csr-rse.nsf/en/Home
Organizational Citizenship Behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_citizenship_behavior
Business Ethics research http://www.businessethics.ca/
Conscious Business Movement, Stakeholder Movement, research on values in management
Social Innovation research http://www.ssireview.org/
Spiritual leadership http://www.spirit4greatness.com/
Management by virtues, principle centered leadership, management by values
Service leadership, servant leadership http://www.greenleaf.org/
Human relations movement and Humanistic psychology http://www.ahpweb.org/index.html
The art of leadership http://membership.acs.org/c/cda/cufaudefinal.pdf
Business as an agent of world benefit (BAWB) http://worldbenefit.case.edu/
Positive Organizational Scholarship http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/
Positive Psychology http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/
Appreciative Inquiry http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/
Integral theory perspective http://www.integralworld.net/

Check these web sites and resources above. They offer tremendous amount of knowledge that will open up your horizons.

Although there are many terms used; it is possible to draw on the commonalities and to point out to an emerging paradigm in organizational scholarship. The most critical research frontiers for the twenty-first century revolve around values, ethics, morality, social responsibility, global sustainability, and spirituality. These organizational theories and concepts emphasize a set of universal values centered on sincerity, integrity, morality, respect, compassion, authenticity, intuition, and service to community.

Changing Paradigms of Management and Leadership

OLD PARADIGM to NEW PARADIGM

SELF CENTERED to COMMUNITY CENTERED
ethnocentric to community oriented
individualistic to communitarian
authoritative to democratic
self-interest to service to community

OLD SCIENCES to NEW SCIENCES
Newtonian to Quantum
linear to non-linear
one truth to multiple truths
reductive to emergent

MATERIALISM to SPIRITUALITY
modernist to post-modernist
"mind" to "integration of mind, heart, soul"
positivist to interpretive
materialist to spiritual

UNIFORMITY to DIVERSITY
hierarchical to lateral
absolute perspective to contextualism
selective to inclusive
simplicity to complexity

RATIONALITY to INTUITION
actuality to potentiality
intellectual stimulation to emotional arousal
problems to opportunities
conservative to creative

PARTIAL to IMPARTIAL
atomistic to holistic
exclusionary to synergistic
analysis to synthesis
partial to integral

PROFIT ORIENTATION to PEOPLE ORIENTATION
Theory X to Theory Z
competition to cooperation
economic to social
profit oriented to triple bottom-line

CERTAINTY to UNCERTAINTY
clarity to ambiguity
order to chaos
determinate to indeterminate
stability to change

COMMAND & CONTROL to FLEXIBILITY & EMPOWERMENT
top down to egalitarian
controlling to inspiring
doubtful to trusting
domination to collaboration

CHARISMATIC to SERVANT
arrogant to humble
impressive to authentic
self-worth to modesty
extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation

OLD METAPHORS to NEW METAPHORS
clockwork/machine to brain/living ecosystem
static box to dynamic flow
solid ice to emergent cloud
building to web/network