100th Monkey Books

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Creativity in Business
Michael Ray & Rochelle Myers (1986) 222pages

Probably the most important aspect of our course (for the MBA program at Stanford) and this book is that we go directly to what helps people bring out useful creativity in business. We don't try to solve the basic mystery of the physiological, cognitive, and social processes that underlie a creative act. Instead we simply note with excitement all the validations of the existence of a beneficial creative force coming from the research laboratories; we revel in each insight gained from spiritual works in both the Western and Eastern traditions; and most of all we glory in the steady, dynamic flow of confirmations and breakthroughs that come through our speakers as well as our students. Who knows why our course works? But work it does. We - Myers and Ray - through teaching the course have gained the invaluable conviction that an ever-present creative source (in this book we call it Essence) is available to each one of us, and we have watched our students gain that same conviction as they prove it in their daily business lives. Our wish is that this book brings the same conviction to you.
-from the authors' Introduction (Doubleday)



Mentoring: The TAO of Giving and Receiving Wisdom
Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch (1995) 161pages

Tao mentoring is a two-way circular dance that provides opportunities for us to experience both giving and receiving (wisdom) without limitations and fears...This mentor dance celebrates unusually gratifying unions of kindred spirits in soulful relationships. The Tao mentoring process is that particular crossroads in life where what you have to offer meets the immediate and future needs of another...Tao mentoring offers a new model of giving and receiving that incorporates ancient Taoist wisdom from Chinese classics and new insights that we have gained from our experience as teachers, mentors, and students. - from the author's Preface (Harper SanFrancisco)


Peripheral Visions: learning along the way
Mary Catherine Bateson (1994) 243pages

There is a spiritual basis to attention, a humility in waiting upon the emergence of pattern from experience. The willingness to assimilate what has been seen or heard draws other life into increasingly inclusive definitions of the self. Looking, listening, and learning offer the modern equivalent of moving through life as a pilgrimage. Even death is a time to learn. This is a book of stories and reflections strung together to suggest a style of learning from experience. ...Our species thinks in metaphor and learns through stories. Many tales have more than one meaning. It is important not to reduce understanding to some narrow focus, sacrificing multiplicity to what might be called the rhetoric of merely: merely a dead sheep, only an atavistic ritual, nothing but a metaphor. Openness to peripheral vision depends on rejecting such reductionism and rejecting with it the belief that questions of meaning have unitary answers. Twenty years after it occurred, in a world increasingly troubled by ethnic conflict, a remembered ritual on the Feast of Sacrifice came to exemplify for me layer upon layer of processes whereby human beings can join and communicate and learn in spite of profound differences. The story grew into this book as memories from Iran resonated with memories of years lived in Israel and in the Philippines. A Persian garden has become a magic carpet. The process of spiraling through memory to weave connection out of incident is basic to learning, so that in this and perhaps other ways the text is a demonstration of its subject matter. - from the author's 1st chapter: Improvisations in a Persian Garden (Harper Perennial)



Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education
Henry David Thoreau ( ) edited by Martin Bickman (1999) 86pages

"It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know." Thoreau wrote. The sign of a truly good book was this: "I must lay it down and commence living on its hint...What I began by reading I must finish by acting." Ideas about education permeate Thoreau's writing, although he never wrote a book on the subject. Uncommon Learning brings his ideas together in a single volume for the first time. (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin)


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