Time for Smelling the Flowers 129.0

My reading list is growing …

On a vacation in Beijing ten years ago, a favorite cousin counseled me to balance my reading with immersion in the real world – her phrase, “to smell the flowers!”

The months of November and December will involve intense immersion for me with projects that ask for deep thought and quick validation from the gathered assembly.

It will be great fun. I do appreciate being given the chance to learn continuously.

I have to force myself to lay down the three great books pictured above after just a quick scan.

• The Fifth Discipline (1990) by Peter Senge for re-reading. It is his definition of learning that I use above as “a process of enhancing learners’ capacity to produce results they truly want to produce- a capacity to create the future” and not just book knowledge.
• Governing the Commons (1990) by Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist who is the 2009 Nobel Prize winner for Economics. She writes about zanjeras in the Philippines as a successful case of managing a common resource – irrigation water. Others are learning from our success; we are still working on learning to disagree. I will keep my promise to write my impressions and possible applications of Professor Ostrom’s ideas for social enterprise at some future post.
• The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (2005) by Jan Fagerberg, David Mowery and Richard Nelson is the latest review of literature on Innovation, as a learning discipline, that was brought into the world by Joseph Schumpeter and raised to its modern practice out of University of Sussex’s SPRU by Christopher Freeman.

Amartya Sen’s newest book, The Idea of Justice (2009), will be with me by November 9 with two other technical books on Web 3.0.

Fortunately, I have already re-read Hendrik Ibsen’s classic play, An Enemy of the Peoplee (1882) for the November 27 session of the Manila Reading Group. The play seems fresh and relevant given its interplay between man, public policy and pollution. I hope my young niece joins the session and enjoys it enough to come again. For October, we had an interesting discussion on The Art of War. I missed past sessions on Sen’s Development as Freedom and Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The Group has an open invitation on Facebook; do visit.

My ongoing projects will immerse me deeply into the flower garden through December: with management students in a caseroom, in an Iloilo farm, with managers in training for corporate culture change, in election systems, and in a London symposium of eminent persons. The common denominator for these seemingly disparate subjects is innovation and change management on different parts of the S-curve.

My dear cousin is right and the more intense the scent of roses, the deeper the imprint of book knowledge, and the more rooted Senge’s learning, as capacity to create the future for myself and our society.

For Amazon links, please click The Fifth Discipline, Governing the Commons,The Oxford Handbook of Innovation, The Idea of Justice, An Enemy of the People, The Art of War, Development as Freedom, and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.