At first blush, The Corporate Shaman is dismissable....Who would believe such a tale of rattles, drums, power animals? But, dig deeper and find the heartbeat of this wonderful book by one of Harvard's own, a consummate businessman and corporate leader. You find a way to connect with the deeper energies of people at work -- something leaders, organizations and all of us crave!!

The Corporate Shaman helps us see what trust, cooperation, synergy, creativity, and tapping into higher potential really mean. It's an allegory -- a story -- like many other business books these days. But the difference is that Shaman practice DOES exist throughout the world. And, it seems to carry with it, a deep-seated knowledge about what makes us tick and how we can connect with each other and higher purpose -- including HIGHER BUSINESS PURPOSE.

Richard Whiteley straddles the mythical and the real in a way that only someone who has been there to produce results without sacrificing soul can do.

How can anyone who leads or influences organizations NOT purchase, read, or find ways to assimilate and act on this book?

Take a risk. Take a chance. Go to the edges. Recognize that the only way we can leap forward is by discovering the heart, soul, and spirit of people. When you do, you will realize that The Corporate Shaman is a fabulous allegory and life myth for making these happen.

Richard Whiteley has written a deeply inspired book no doubt with great help from his own "power animal." It responds to the urgent need for leaders to be silent for awhile, to surrender just a bit, and to listen to the voice of the single intelligence that lies underneath it all. Finally, in an appropriately metaphorical medium, we have a book that will help us wake up. The book's publication could not have come at a better time, a time when the events of 9/11, the collapse of the internet bubble, Enron, Andersen, Afghanistan are causing us, if we're not hoplessly anesthetized, to renew our search for meaning and purpose in our lives.

I loved The Corporate Shaman. Richard Whiteley does a phenomenal job of reintroducing ancient knowledge in practical, logical and understandable terms. Somehow, in the last few hundred years, we have forgotten what we collectively have known
for thousands of years: that all suffering, illness and maliase, whether corporate or individual, is a result of a loss of spirit or soul which them manifest in the body (corpus) or the collective (corporation). In order to regain wholeness and heal the spirit must be reclaimed. For over 15 years, I have seen the profound impact shamanic work has had on individuals but have not been sufficiently brave enough to introduce these concepts and techniques into the corporate environment. Richard Whitely, and his character Jason Hand, have the courage, precise timing and storytelling ability to make the introduction fascinating, realistic, entertaining and powerful.

A collection of short stories, _Hidden Years_ fills in some missing spots in the storyline, mostly from the time period before the 'Shards'and Kings of the Broken Wheel timeline. It was really nice to see that a story could indeed be covered in the equivalent of one issue of a comic book. My favorites are the story depicted on the cover and the origin story for Skywise. No spoilers here, just go out and get it.

Wendy is arguably the best comic book artist of our time, and this little gem has got to be her greatest work ever. This is the very first book by the Pinis that I bought. (Which may I recommend that you don't get this first. You will be very confused, even though the stories are great in themselves.) This one book started the Elf-mania in my family. Now, I buy all of them, even the off-the-wall side stories that are more humorous than anything (see "New Blood" and "Worldpool"). It's really great artwork and rich color are the best. And Strongbow is a heartthrob.;)

Wendy Pini has certainly outdone herself! Her artwork has always been versatile, changing to fit the mood of the story. In this graphic novel, she used vivid watercolors to tell the tale. It's amazing! The stories are also superb, in the honored tradition of Elfquest. My favorite story is the one about Tyleet and her adopted human cub, Little Patch. Wendy Pini is definetly my favorite artist! :)

I say this is more (much more) bloody than others of four ordinary ElfQuest, but it is writed well. There is a story much morer than ever in "Fire & Flight". Kahvi's the new character in this( you see her in picture) , and she is the chief on elkriders, who call themselves Go-Backs. Go-Backs live in shadow of mountains were is a HOME OF HIGH ONES. And with wolfriders they found it. once more i will say: Wolfriders never die. Yes, I know one-eye just did in a "Captives of Blue mountain", but, if you read this, you se how many of Go-Backs die. And that is normal. But NONE of wolfriders. They have armors as much as Go-backs.

But to end this, I tell you: Wendy and Richard teach us in every book , and they tell about life.

VERY GOOD!! the best yet.

Believe me, you just won't believe this! This is the most skillfully drawn and written part of the whole "Elfquest" series next to the part about the adventures in the Blue Mountain. In fact, you won't see anything like this ever again in any Elfquest tales, nor even the future ones yet to come, I suspect. The great epic of war against the bloodthirsty Trolls of the Great White North begins right after the imprisonment of elves in the Blue Mountain by the witchlike Winnowill - a real teeth-rattling clash of so many different characters, old or new with their individual personalities and differences. In additional, a whole galaxy of the fantastic environment on the far-off World of Two Moons really opens up for the very first time to your mortal human eyes - from the monstrous labyrinth of the Troll lair to the shimmering walls of the long-lost Palace of the High Ones - with a whole bagful of earth-shaking surprises to boot! If you already have this rare book or are lucky enough to get your hands on a copy, I sincerely promise you that you just won't be able to put it down, nor read it just once!

I saw this book on "Between the Lions" and I loved it, so I bought it. I figured my daughter (then about 18 months) wouldn't have any interest, but I'd keep it until she got older. Boy, was I wrong. She loves it. She loves looking at it by herself and she loves us to read it to her. I'm not a major jazz fan, but the book is impossible to read without feeling the rhythm. The illustrations are fun and the cat looks just like ours!

Picked this book up at the Library after it was featured on PBS's Between The Lions. My son never put the book down, so we bought it. The book is fun, easy to read for children, and the pictures are great. Both my boys have it memorized and read it often.

No doubt about it. A classic that has my three year old now in love with be bop. Beautiful, whimsical paintings and delicious text! A great alternative to usual kid book drivel and TV engineered pap like authur, bernstien bears and disney stuff. Looking for children's literature. You found it.

OK, I think the book appears to cover the ground I want to find out about. The problem is I haven't yet made enough out of my inventions to afford to buy this book, that will tell me how to make money out of my inventions.

I am being slightly flippant, but I am trying to make a serious point. Bootstrapping always is and always was the problem for all inventors trying to license their technology. You need some capital before you can protect your ideas sufficiently well that you can make money from the licenses to it. Patent protection is enormously expensive for the individual.

If you start out as in inventor, you almost by definition start with no capital. If you start with capital, chances are you are only a part time inventor. So, who is the book pitched at and does it tell the reader how to solve the bootstrapping problem?

If the book has the answer to this one question, then I'd say it is a good buy. If not, then it won't help. I won't know the answer until I see a copy.

What can I say? This guy is the guy behind Furby. My kids no longer even play with that revised Cabbage Patch upgrade!

But, if he can make a fortune, why can't I?

Okay, I'm not gonna tell you what my ideas are, but I will say I also used Michael levine's Guerila PR: Wired. Why am I telling you this?

Simple! I lost a bet with my ex-wife. I thought about getting my lawyer's advice, but he had to "suddenly leave town."

Anyway, I think Levy has some good ideas, so I really suggest using it. You might want an apartment near the u.S. Patent Office, though. And near your banker.

This is the best book on invention marketing that I have ever read. It is compulsively readable; deliciously explored. Levy's writing is energetic, down-to-earth, and just plain fascinating reading.   His vast, firsthand knowledge of the process is awesome. This book is of interest and help to more than just inventors.
 

I'll say openly that I'm no fan of Werewolf. Don't get me wrong, I understand the system and I've played my share of the characters, but werewolves always seem to be played a bit to slash and kill for my taste. Well, you can imagine my surprise when a friend lent me this book and told me, despite my less the cheerful comments on the subject of werewolves, that it wasn't like the others. He was definitely right. Not only are were-ravens extremely interesting, and the book it's self amusing. It's a wonderful change of style from the typical werewolf characters. Were-ravens aren't slash and kill characters, but they have other interesting skills that lend depth to any game I've seen them in. Not only would I suggest this book to were-creature fans, I would suggest it to people who aren't (like me) because if you think that were-wolves are all about death, be prepared for a wonderful surprise.

The wereravens are the messengers and scouts in the world of Werewolf. The history of the breed is narrated by a humorous Corax, who takes things that you think to be written in biblical style writing, and translates it into modern english (VERY funny)
I suggest this book to anyone who plays Werewolf but is getting tired of strictly garou and wants to add some color to the game.

Honestly--I picked up this book because I was going to be creating a character to help a friend out and I was immediately hooked! I read the thing from cover to cover and have several times since. The text is written with a great sense of humor and gives valuable insight to the workings of those wacky little were-ravens.

This is a very interesting book in explaining how to initiate communities of practice, their lifecycle and their role in the sharing and development of knowledge. Over the last ten or twenty years there has been much written about new organizational structures and the emerging importance of developing and retaining knowledge within corporations. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder approach this topic from a social perspective and apply some standard community building concepts to "communities of practice". This contrasts much of the popular thinking on these topics that tend to overemphasize the role of technology in helping to build communities or address knowledge management issues.

Cultivating Communities of Practice is and excellent handbook for anyone involved in the setup, participation or stewardship of "communities of practice" within a corporation. I would though suggest that the emphasis is on "corporation", which in some cases implies individuals having some predetermined alignment (presumably with the interests of the corporation). There is some very good discussion at the end of the book covering communities of practice outside of the corporation with and some review of supply chains and 3rd sector examples, although very limited coverage. It was noted that the focus has been on corporations as this is where there are solid examples of these practices. Hopefully a future book will address this area in more depth.

This book is identified as "A Guide to Managing Knowledge", and it does fit this description well. If you still believe that technology can be the primary component of a knowledge management strategy, then you need this book to better understand the nature of knowledge management in terms of communities of practice.

Writing a good book on the topic of communities of practice must a difficult task. The research challenge arises from the difficulty of finding hard data in a soft subject. The complexity of human interactions in groups defies neat categorizations and explanations. The authors of this highly readable volume do better than you might expect. Combining their deep knowledge in the subject with examples from a range of large companies (Shell Oil, Hewlett-Packard, Ben & Jerry's), they explain how this promising aspect of knowledge management and organizational culture can work. Along with stories about communities of practice at various stages of development, the authors succeed in providing a fairly well-developed scheme for these communities and their care and feeding.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. This book explains the potential value of CoPs, their structural elements, principles for crafting CoPs, analyzes their stages of growth, explores their downsides, investigates how to measure the value they create, and what role they play in community-based knowledge initiatives. It seems unfair to criticize this book, but more detail on how to implement CoPs would have been welcome. The authors have developed a helpful framework for understanding CoPs, illustrated by examples, but the reader will still need to think hard to implement them in a new setting.

This book, just published by "the three musketeers of Communities of Practice", is a practical guide to managing knowledge. What makes this book special is that it goes far beyond the simple explanation and advocacy for communities of practice, which we have all been reading about for the last five years. Through in-depth cases from firms such as DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, the authors expand on many practical aspects one should have in mind when engaging in a community development: The "seven principles", the "five development steps" are presented in practical terms and with great details so that they can be used as a framework for all practitioners.

The approach to "cultivating" and nurturing communities, as opposed to "managing" them, is also explained so that managers will hopefully resist the urge to try and control them using mechanistic mental models. At last, the question of measuring value creation for organizations is addressed in convincing and, again, practical ways.

There is also some wisdom in this book. The "dark side" of communities of practice is also addressed. If unproperly managed, communities of practice can indeed create isolation, collusion, or tensions, which can be quite destructive for community members and sponsoring organizations.

This book is an essential reading for any leader in today's knowledge economy. It will undoubtedly remain as a reference for all of us practitioners who want to develop communities of practice for the benefit and long-term success of organizations and their employees.

This is an important book, not because it "exposes" the "hypocracy of the left". Such right-wing polemics are common, and usually worthless. In fact, it is by no means anti-left.

Unlike right-wing polemicists, who lose no opportunity to show their disgust of ideas such as black liberations, women's rights, or seperation of church and state, Ellis supports these ideas. His point is not that the IDEAS are "bad"--but that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Ellis argues that it is precisely BECAUSE the nominal goal of many leftist movements is so appealing that such organizations, in practive, become, first, beurocratic and inefficient, and finally tyrannical and cultic. Utopianism leads to extremism: if your goal is "make money", it's unlikely that you will kill millions to achieve it--it's not worth the trouble. But if your goal is "world peace forever", you just might: after all, what are the lives of a few people compared to this magnificent goal?

An excellent example, given by Ellis, is Bellamy's "Looking Backwards"--a look back, from the year 2000, which lives in utopian socialism, at all the capitalistic injustices of 1900. The "tiny" problem is that, in order to achieve this utopia, most of Bellamy's adherents were quite willing to commit murder and arson in order to get rid of the "evil capitalists". The DID succeed in doing that in Russia--but, of course, Bellamy's utopia never materialized.

This book is important because of the asymmetry between right and left extremism. The difference is not that the left extremists are essentially worse than the right extremists (Ellis notes, rightly, that it is Utopianism that is the problem--whether a "left-wing" or "right-wing utopia doesn't matter); it is that people are already aware that nazism and fascism weren't such hot ideas, and not too many are aware that the soft-spoken "liberal" professor in your local college town is working along the same lines....

The one problem with this book is that it takes the left too seriously. Unlike Russia before the revolution, the left in the US is, essentially, confined to college campuses and a few "enclaves" such as Greenwich Village and Berkeley. The risk of "totaliatarian thought control" by extremist academics is a problem for the tiny minority working in the humanities; not nice, but not exactly the same as life under Stalin or Hitler. Everybody else--from academics in business or science to the "average Joe"--can free themselves from these supposedly "powerful" organizations by simply ignoring them (which, incidentally, they do.)

Ellis, who IS part of this minority, naturally sees the threat very seriously; but becoming hysterical about the "evils of the politically correct university" can lead to the same extreme actions--only from the right--against anybody suspected of being a "radical leftist"; the same kind of witch-hunt that Ellis, rightly, abhors whether it is from the right or the left.

Loved it. Cheers, thanks a lot!

The remarkable capacity of mankind to hear what he wants to hear while disregarding the rest is as evident in the close mindedness of the Left as it is in the religious zealotry of the Right. Ellis does a fine job of bringing this compartmentalized brain syndrome condition into focus as he covers all the bases while uncovering the corruption of the various Liberal bastions. We need more intellectually honest social critics like Ellis to call the hand of the Tom Hayden's of the world. Anything to increase the speed of the pendulum as it continues its swing back toward the political middle. It can't happen soon enough

An interesting book to read as a companion piece to Ellis' book is "Damned Lies and Statistics" by Joel Best. In it he discloses the methods that institutional elite's, who would have their way with you, manipulate statistics to their gain and to your loss. H.G Wells predicted that the ability to think statistically would become as important, to citizens of a democracy, as the ability to read and write. In this statement he was, and is, correct.

Father Neuhaus has titled his book "Death on a Friday Afternoon" because that is when Jesus died. But his meditations on the seven last "words" of Jesus (actually, the seven last utterances) provide an understanding and explanation that will lead thoughtful readers into the meaning of the resurrection as well. Neuhaus, however, does not want readers to get to the resurrection without pondering carefully what is meant by the seven words on the cross, a compilation from the Gospel accounts.
I found Neuhaus'es book refreshing, in that it helped me to contemplate in a careful manner the circumstances in which Jesus uttered his words and the reason that he gave them.
Along the way Neuhaus introduces aspects of Catholic theology that are a part of his faith and world-view, but a Protestant reading the book (like myself) may find somewhat beside the point. Far more illuminating are the asides to social issues that are relevant to what Jesus said and taught.
In summary, a profoundly insightful book, caputuring the mystery of God in human form, dying painfully but purposefully on the cross for the sins of humankind.

The Seven Last Words are not seven "words" but seven "utterances" and they are these:
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
"Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise."
"Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother."
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
"I thirst."
"It is finished."
"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

These are the seven biblically recorded utterances of Christ on the cross, and Neuhaus has written, in my opinion, the superlative meditation of the significance of these final words of Jesus. Each chapter expounds upon one of these "words". The writing is so clear-headed... it will appeal to those who need to approach the ineffable mystery with at least one foot on the ground. Or even two! It is not spiritual platitude, it is gut-level and sobering. Have you ever wondered what happened when Jesus died on the cross? Or WHY it happened? Or IF it happened? This book speaks to those questions, with a rational approach that can only be likened to the writings of C.S. Lewis.
I was transfixed, and overwhelmed (in a good way) with the wealth of information in Neuhaus's book. Beautifully written.
He says in the preface, "If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything. I have written this for people who are convinced of that truth, for people who are open to thinking about whether it may be true and for people who are just curious about why so much of the world thinks Good Friday is the key to understanding what Dante called 'the love that moves the sun and all the other stars.'"
The Convinced. The Cautious. The Curious. If you are any of these three types, this book will not disappoint you.
"We must not turn away from what we have done to God, lest we be found to have turned away from what He has done for us." (p.257).

I read this book during Holy Week and Fr. Neuhaus' insights really deepened my experiences leading up to Good Friday. This book lays out many different facets of Jesus' teaching and meaning in a very accessible way.

I highly recommend it.

True to their relationship in Fire and Flight, Cutter and Skywise prove to readers that they are indeed "brothers in all but blood", as they travel the world of two moons in search of other elves, so that all the children of the High Ones may be reunited. They meet some of the most Enchanting dangers along the way, that perhaps any work of fantasy may boast, and the artwork By Wendy remains SUPERB as ever. You cannot help but be touched by the relationships in this and the other seven original full color elfquest graphic novels by Wendy and Richard Pini.

Beautifully crafted! The greatest story ever told comes to paperback! Wendy and Richard Pini bring the legend of Elfquest to paperback along with all the details they had to leave out of the illustrated series. Discover the adventure for the first time, or embark on it all over again through written word.

The second book in the elfquest saga following Fire and Flight. This is simply the best in fantasy writing!