Futurists' Bookshop

Some of these titles are still available to purchase. To make an enquiry, please email bookshop@nevillefreeman.com.

2002 Installment I
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the origins of knowledge
By Jeremy Narby
The Edward Said Reader
By Edward Said (eds Bayoumi and Rubin)
Inside Chinese Business - A guide for manager's worldwide
By Ming-Jer Chen
Reframing Business - When the map changes the landscape
By Richard Normann
Boss Talk - Top CEOs share ideas...
By Editors of the Wall Street Journal
Towards Sustainability
By Jackie Venning & John Higgins

The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the origins of knowledge
By Jeremy Narby
ISBN: 0874779642
Publisher & date: Putnam, April 1998
Format: Paperback
Price: A$19.95

The Cosmic Serpent is a personal adventure story, a fascinating study of anthropology and ethnopharmacology, and, most important, a truly revolutionary look at how knowledge and consciousness may come into being. For ten years, Jeremy Narby explored Amazonian rain forests, the libraries of Europe, and some of the world's most arcane scientific journals, researching the possibility that specific knowledge might somehow be transferred through DNA.

Narby says it best, here's an extract from his journey:

The first time an Ashaninca man told me that he had learned the medicinal properties of plants by drinking a hallucinogenic brew, I thought he was joking. We were in the forest squatting next to a bush whose leaves, he claimed, could cure the bite of a deadly snake. 'One learns these things by drinking ayahuasca,' he said. But he was not smiling.

It was early 1985, in the community of Quirishari in the Peruvian Amazon's Pichis Valley. I was 25 years old and starting a two-year period of field-work to obtain a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. My training had led me to expect that people would tell tall stories. I thought my job as an anthropologist was to discover what they really thought, like some kind of private detective.

During my research on Ashaninca ecology, people in Quirishari regularly mentioned the hallucinatory world of ayahuasqueros, or shamans. In conversations about plants, animals, land, or the forest, they would refer to ayahuasqueros as the source of knowledge. Each time, I would ask myself what they really meant when they said this.

My fieldwork concerned Ashaninca resource use - with particular emphasis on their rational and pragmatic techniques. To emphasise the hallucinatory origin of Ashaninca ecological knowledge would have been counterproductive to the main argument underlying my research. Nevertheless, the enigma remained: These extremely practical and frank people, living almost autonomously in the Amazonian forest, insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations. How could this be true? BUY

The Edward Said Reader
By Edward Said (eds Bayoumi and Rubin)
ISBN: 1862074453
Publisher & date: Granta, October 2001
Format: Paperback
Price: A$35.00

Insightful stuff from the man once dubbed 'Arafat's guy in New York'. Surprisingly topical too in the current climate, The Edward Said Reader presents key selections from Said's works, from his groundbreaking 1966 study of Joseph Conrad and the extraordinarily influential Orientalism, through Culture and Imperialism, Peace and its Discontents and his recent critically acclaimed Out of Place. Whether he is writing on the Hebron Massacre or the fight for Palestinian self-determination, on Jane Austen or Rudyard Kipling, Said's uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he tackles.

The Edward Said Reader will prove an indispensable resource for political and cultural analysts, literature and history buffs, indeed anyone who cares to delve deeper in search of questions and answers to today's problems. BUY

Inside Chinese Business - A guide for manager's worldwide
By Ming-Jer Chen
ISBN: 1578512328
Publisher & date: Harvard Business School, March 2001
Format: Hardcover
Price: A$80.95

This is a no nonsense look at the nature of business practices in China. Straight off the cuff, Dr Chen frames the businessperson's dilemma in China: 'Many non-Chinese find the behavior of Chinese business people to be difficult to understand. To understand it, one must understand Chinese culture'.

The book introduces us to the Chinese idea of networking and Guanxi, with individual chapters on communicating in a business context and negotiating with the Chinese. The book rounds out logically with a look at the impact of modernisation on business practices in China.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 2 in which Chen takes readers through the critical family dimension of Business in China:

According to a famous saying, when a Chinese individual is honored, his whole family is honored. When he is condemned, his whole family is condemned.

The family had a practical use in China's agrarian society, but Confucius added a moral dimension and broadened it to mutually dependent societal relationships. Every person has an important role as a link in the network of society.

The family is the foundation of Chinese organizations, including business ones. In the West, one often refers to 'family businesses'. For the Chinese, the term 'business families' may be more appropriate since the family comes first and the business comes second. Rather than creating wealth, the Chinese tend to see their business duties more as responsibilities to the family.

For Chinese living outside the PRC, the family-based business model is strong. In mainland China, the family-based model of business diminished as communist rulers attempted to replace family loyalty with loyalty to the party. More recently, the increase in the number of non-state businesses, many of which are family-run, has helped the family model of business to reappear.

Four features of Chinese business families are that they are family-directed, there is a dominant family head, it has enduring roles and family obligations, and it is family-financed and family accountable. BUY

Reframing Business - When the map changes the landscape
By Richard Normann
ISBN: 0471485578
Publisher & date: John Wiley June 2001
Format: Hardcover
Price: A$55.95

In 1983 Richard Normann published the world's first book presenting an integrated framework on the management of service producing companies. Now he provides a new approach to strategy: an original way to think about organisations and create a different future. In this demanding but rewarding book he shows that providing organisations are prepared to rethink the way they do business they can occupy the competitive high ground of the future. To do this they must transform concepts and frameworks into action.

This is a book on change of biblical proportion, it runs the reader through a series of new business models, and shows companies how to reframe their business and take advantage of the opportunities created in the space of 'unbundling and rebundling'. Both Norman and his new book are highly recommended by the likes of Chris Argyris at Monitor and GBN's Kees van der Heijden. BUY

Boss Talk - Top CEOs share the ideas that drive the world's most successful companies
By Editors of the Wall Street Journal
ISBN: 1865087505
Publisher & date: Allen & Unwin, February 2002
Format: Paperback
Price: A$24.95

Apparently, everyone wants to know the ideas that drive the world's most successful companies. Boss Talk presents 21 candid interviews with some of the world's top CEOs on topics of concern to today's manager and entrepreneur-from motivating your employees, managing growth, building a brand, learning from the new economy, trendspotting, and beating the competition to leading a successful turnaround or transition.

Boss Talk includes exclusive one-on-one interviews with Jack Welch (GE), Tom Freston (MTV), John Chambers (Cisco Systems) and Juergen Schrempp (Daimler-Chrysler), who in their own words describe what it takes to effectively lead an organisation in the (relatively) new economy. If you're looking for a quick fix, this is the one for you! BUY

Towards Sustainability
By Jackie Venning & John Higgins
ISBN: 0868406678
Publisher & date: UNSW Press, 2001
Format: Paperback
Price: A$49.95

While the term 'sustainable development' has entered the popular vocabulary as the ideal environmental outcome for economic expansion, the process it represents remains somewhat vague and undefined. This book addresses the new systems of documenting ecologically sustainable development from a uniquely Australian perspective, examining the history of sustainability concepts, environmental and economic structures and indicators, and the design of future models of sustainability. Venning and Higgins bring together an impressive collection of contributors to provide a valuable insight into Australia's progress towards the realisation of a sustainable society.

As Peter Ellyard comments:

This book will help our understanding of some core aspects of sustainability, in particular understanding of the workings of both sustainable and unsustainable systems, and it will help us to develop tools to assess whether we are progressing in our journey towards the realisation of a sustainable society. BUY

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