Recommended Reads

OPEN LETTERS

You have got to love open letters for their sheer, thought-provoking inspiration. Here are a few recent favourites worth reading:

The Ammerdown Invitation: Security for the Future: in Search of a New Vision

A group of thoughtful UK peacebuilding professionals invite participation in a new civic conversation about alternatives to the current approach to national security in the UK. They lay ot their concerns and offer a different vision for the future.

(From CIVICUS): Building from Below and Beyond Borders

This global call to keep “the voices and actions of people are at the heart of our work” is reinforced in an article from Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah Secretary-General of Civicus. He writes about how NGOs in the world today “find ourselves reinforcing the social, economic and political systems we once set out to transform. We have become part of the problem, rather than the solution.”

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Requisite Organization: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organization and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century by Elliott Jaques

This is a super useful book if you are wrestling with how to help your organisational change its managerial systems. He writes single-idea chapters and illustrates each one. The premise that runs throughout the book is about trust, and it’s a decidedly optimistic one:

“Systems designed to allow for mutual trust can tap the deep wells of constructive behaviour that we all possess, and release the creative cooperation that most of us value but all to rarely have the opportunity to enjoy”

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This is one of Adam Curle’s most inspiring writings, packed full of wisdom including:

“The only enemy is war and the waste and suffering it brings”

“The obstacles to peace are very often more psychological than substantive. The purpose of mediation is to remove these obstacles”