Praise for Synchronicity
“A deeply personal and moving narrative that opens up new vistas on compassion, commitment, and connectedness – and hence on leadership.”
– James MacGregor Burns, Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential biographer and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government, Emeritus, Williams College
“An insightful, profound, and readable contribution to understanding the personal side of leadership.”
– Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of SuperCorp
“An unusually thoughtful exploration of the ‘inner’ aspects of leadership, particularly in the business arena, surfaces in Joseph Jaworski’s Synchronicity. Eschewing easy answers and ten-point plans to success, presenting the insights he has garnered from forward-looking thinkers including David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake, Jaworski offers a searching and wise brief that deserves to be read in board-rooms everywhere.”
“Synchronicity is an intensely personal and compelling book. As I reeled from Jaguars to mountain-tops to oil companies and a rare window on history, I was grateful that Joe Jaworski let us travel with him on ‘the inner path of leadership.’”
– Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO, Leader to Leader Institute
“From seemingly simple early chords, this book develops into a prophetic symphony by its conclusion.”
– M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled
“Synchronicity is a book that anyone serious about leadership will have to read.”
– Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline
“Synchronicity illustrates that leadership is about the release of human possibilities, about enabling others to break free of limits – created organizationally or self-imposed. Although this book describes the author’s personal journey, it contains profound messages about organizational learning and effectiveness.”
– Phil Carroll, President and CEO Emeritus, Shell Oil Company
“Written from the heart as well as the head, Synchronicity is the story of one man’s journey toward the place we all must go in the century ahead. Jaworski’s life demonstrates that the immense cultural and institutional change that a livable future demands can begin anytime, anywhere, in anyone, even those who have benefited greatly from the old order of things.”
– Dee W. Hock, founder and President and CEO Emeritus, Visa International
“Jaworski’s personal search for insight and inspiration is told so compellingly that the reader hardly notices how deep is the philosophy of leadership it conveys – and how broadly relevant to leaders in every domain.”
– Harlan Cleveland, former President, World Academy of Art and Science
“I’ve spent my life writing about a new way to think and to be. Joe Jaworski has spent his living it. His deeply personal vision of Servant Leadership, nurtured by a courageous openness to love, to pain, and to his own and others’ experience, is told with a profound simplicity. Synchronicity touched deeply both my head and my heart.”
– Danah Zohar, coauthor of Spiritual Capital
“No other book is like this one. Its gripping life stories punctuate a how-to on managing toward ‘predictable miracles’ by exploring your ‘cubic centimeters of chance.’ What a wake-up call!”
– Tom Brown’s Top Ten Business Books of 1996
“Joseph Jaworski pinpoints the astonishing encounters that manifested in his life when he followed his inner compass. Wise guides rose spontaneously; fate cleared blockages; love was caught in an airport passing; even an ermine communed eye to eye. Jaworski’s life story teaches us how to recognize and respond to our own moments of inner knowing and how these personal shifts can reverberate in the world.”
– Lois Farfel Stark, American Leadership Forum Fellow and President, Stark Productions, Inc.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Since the publication of the first edition of Synchronicity, I’ve been searching for the principles that lie at the heart of the phenomenon I described there – the capacity we have to sense and actualize emerging futures and to shape the future instead of simply responding to the forces at large. What is the source of our capacity to access the wisdom for action we need in the moment? How can we learn to enable that capacity, individually and collectively?
The answers to these questions were slowly revealed to me over a fifteen-year period. Because I feel adequate now to be explicit about what I’ve learned, I’ve added important material to this second edition, including four principles that lie at the heart of participating in the unfolding of the universe.
In the process of this search, I gave serious consideration to the Western scientific-materialistic worldview – our underlying belief system, which has prevailed in the West for over two hundred years. I believe that this belief system is no longer adequate for the issues our society is facing; that a historic shift is now occurring; and that a more comprehensive worldview is emerging. Institutions can play a leading role in enabling this emerging worldview.
