Description
How can we connect more deeply with others at work? And connect more wholeheartedly with our work tasks, so as to create mutual support, respect, meaning and growth? This book researches the soul, that wonderful, old-fashioned word, soul. How did such a familiar word in common usage fall into disuse? A possible cause of our forgetting the soul is the fact that we spend much of our lives in organisations. While in former times the human being lived in personal relationships and communities, and had immediate experiences there of life and death, survival and faith, today we are embedded in a web of self-organised life relationships that are mostly functionally and materially determined. In these functionally organised connections we create a world of our own with things, and also with meaning. These can only last if we take care of them ourselves. There here is little attention paid to people’s inner world and experience. But it is exactly in this inner world that meaning and development occur, which enable us to take another step in our own growth. Our organised, functional world has, in my opinion, an urgent need of re-imagining the soul. The questions that we personally struggle with may not find new answers if we cannot find new, conscious relationships to the human soul, especially in work situations where we are oriented toward results and production.
-Adriaan Bekman, from the Foreword
Adriaan Bekman PhD is the director of the Institute for Human and Organizational Development (IMO) in Holland. He chairs the Board of the Bernard Lievegoed College for Liberal Arts.
Useful for advisors, managers, leaders and educators, this imaginative book reveals the timeless wisdom of the forgotten language of the human soul, and renews the wellsprings of inner life.
Organisations with Soul was first published as De Taal van de Ziel by Uitgeverij Christofoor
