Let It Go
A guide to the pain you won’t put down
The most personal book on the shelf. Everyone tells you to let it go, as if you hadn’t already tried. You hold on because something intelligent in you decided the pain was worth keeping: the anger protects, the grief keeps someone close, the guilt keeps you honest. It worked, until it didn’t. Told through six people exactly as stuck as you are, the book treats pain the way the rest of this shelf treats conflict — a signal from a system that once needed it, an adaptation that has outlived its purpose. It won’t ask you to forget what happened. It will show you how to stop letting it own what happens next.
The Anatomy of Viability
How Stafford Beer saw what management science still can’t
The book underneath the method. Management science was assembled to answer two questions: how do we do this faster, and how do we do this bigger. Neither one decides whether an organization is still here in twenty years. Stafford Beer answered the question that does, fifty years ago, and almost nobody picked it up. Told through a European industrial company that is profitable, well run and quietly coming apart, the book takes his model out of the cybernetics literature and puts it back where it belongs — on the wall of the room where people are trying to work out why a decision made in March had stopped meaning anything by June. Six things an organization has to contain in order to stay alive, set down as an anatomy rather than a philosophy, because the useful property of an anatomy is that you can go and look and find out whether a part is there.
The manuscript is finished and the book is in production. Publication details to follow.