“What is your book about?”

When people ask me what my books are about, I always refer to the blurb. A lot of time and energy goes into writing a short, powerful summary of your book.

My book Our Inner Limits consists of two parts:

Part 1 — People and Organization
Part 2 — People and Civilization

And it is based on two fundamental paradoxes:

1 — The Collaboration Paradox: we work together to fail.
2 — The Existence Paradox: we live together to become extinct.

I start my journey with the individual and then move through group and society to the suprasystem: Mother Earth and human civilization. That’s quite a lot for one book! It is 384 pages, 624 grams ‘clean on the hook’. It’s quite the journey, but in the end, I hope it’s worth the travel.

This is the structure of my book:

Chapter 1 | Context

About the dilemmas, barriers and paradoxes of the nature of the beast: Homo sapiens, ‘the wise, modern, thinking man’.

PART 1 | PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATION

Chapter 2 | About people, groups and behavior

How the individual influences the small social group and vice versa: ‘when you know your small group, you know your organization.’

Chapter 3 | Our organizational dilemmas

How leadership determines corporate culture and that we can learn much more about this by asking ‘why-questions’.

Chapter 4 | The concept of maturity

Why organizational maturity is always about soft skills and never about hard skills: is it okay to be middle-mature?

Chapter 5 | The highly mature organization

What we need to do to solve the collaboration paradox and how we can circumvent the definition of insanity.

PART 2 | PEOPLE AND CIVILIZATION

Chapter 6 | Who we are and what we do

Human progress is not a primary goal, but only a side-effect: are we doomed to get extinct?

Chapter 7 | Our big problems

Why climate change is the clearest symptom of overshoot (overconsumption) and what the world’s super-rich have to do with it.

Chapter 8 | The climate confrontation

No climate book, report or conference has ever changed rising greenhouse gas emissions. Why is that and where does it lead?

Chapter 9 | The highly mature civilization

On the suprasystem 2.0: about neocology and neoconomics and how to keep your finger tight on the climate pulse.

In Our Inner Limits I provide you, the honorable reader, with every opportunity to draw your own conclusions about the nature of the beast Homo sapiens. I’m curious to learn what you will come up with.