On My Bookshelf - Jon Mullican
 
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure The World by Tracy Kidder.

Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder, examines the life of a radically benevolent healer, Paul Farmer. By engaging Farmer directly over several years, Kidder gains a glimpse of Farmer’s passion for caring for AIDS/HIV tuberculosis patients, first in Haiti, then South America, then the world. Farmer grew up in the south, living with his family on a bus converted into a home. Farmer’s novel upbringing did not limit his intellect. Simultaneous to attending Harvard Medical School, Farmer began Partners in Health (PIH), to provide care to those in Haiti who could not get it otherwise. He braved civil war and Haitian rebels to deliver drugs and care to those deep in the Haitian mountains. Overtime, he began to engage political bodies, including the United Nations, to bring millions of dollars to bear on the diseases the world desired to ignore. Surreally, Farmer fell into a significant relationship with the daughter of Roald Dahl, author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach.” Kidder well captures the breakneck pace of Farmer’s life, a vigorous, challenging, mysterious life, and shows what one man’s passion for the less fortunate can do. This book will inspire anyone with a heart for the less fortunate and downtrodden.
 
Generation To Generation by Edwin Friedman

Friedman presents family systems theory as it applies to church leadership, especially leadership delivered via the clergy. His work provides a worthy framework for all who would lead in a church. His main premise: family of origin dictates our behavior until we are, as individuals, able to gain distance from that experience and understand, as much as possible, how we have been shaped by it and how it continues to shape our interactions with others in our family, church and general sphere. Once the influence of family of origin is recognized, individuals can then objectively view themselves inside their family systems (family of origin, nuclear family, church family) and lead by taking positions while staying connected relationally to others (not cutting people off who disagree for fear of relational pain or fusing with those who disagree out of fear of abandonment). This last concept is called self differentiation and is, according to Friedman, a pillar of leadership. This book is dense and requires significant attention to fully grasp. It is a core text in Master of Divinity programs throughout the nation. For those who desire to lead in the family rich context of church, it is an absolute must.
 
Leadership And The New Science by Margaret J. Wheatley

Wheatley, an organization development consultant, explores new vistas of organization via the new sciences of quantum theory, chaos theory, self organizing systems and the like. Showing that modern thinking uses Newtonian structures to create organizations, Wheatley suggests that this mechanistic way of building organizations is becoming untenable in the 21st century of rapid communication, information exchange, and human potential. Wheatley suggests that creating organizations using quantum theory where relationships between parts suggest what might be true, or using chaos theory, where initial conditions slightly changed result in totally different creations than otherwise, or using self organizing systems thinking, where reconstruction and deconstruction are simply the inhaling and exhaling of life – using these new sciences as frames for organization allow wonderful possibilities that mechanistic thinking cannot abide. Wheatley challenges modern, mechanistic convention for what must come next relative to organizing human activity. This book may result in a spiritual as well as an organizational epiphany for some.
 
 
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