Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change
by Don Edward Beck, Christopher Cowan

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Book Reviews of Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change

Book Review: Valuable Theory - Difficult Reading
Summary: 3 Stars

The two reasons why this book only gets 3 stars are 1) the way it is written and 2) because the authors have written it "as if" they are the *sole* owners of this theory, a kind of thinking that shows they haven't reached the highest level of evolution themselves. The second remark may explain why one cannot distinguish between the original thinking of GRAVES and the extensions of the authors. The first remark explains why this book is hard to "digest": the structure of the book doesn't make it easy to collect all information for each level, nor is it easy to derive from the book how one would apply these principles, say in a therapeutic or business context. Also an index is missing, but that is partly compensated by adding a good resource list at the end of the book.

Graves' model is a dynamic model of human consciousness evolution, which includes 7 levels of development, each with particular kinds of thinking and beliefs. At jobEQ we recommend this kind of thinking to find out whether someone you want to hire is "compatible" with your companies culture. Beck and Cowan have been using Graves work on an even larger level: looking at values that are valid across cultures and subcultures in society, for instance helping to resolve conflicts between subcultures in the UK and South-Africa.

Patrick E.C. Merlevede -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

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