The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life.  by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA. 2009 The Three Laws of Performance is not the kind of book I usually review on this blog. Written for an audience committed to improving the performance of business organizations, it might be hard to see what this book has to do with creating a peaceful world. I have also written about transformational peacemaking and shifting the conversation about peace and violence in the world. The ideas outlined in this book, though oriented toward the business community, are eminently transferable to the larger challenge of creating change in the international geopolitical arena where war, terrorism and genocide take place.

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 A World in a Dramatic State of Change                                                                                                          The winds of change are whirling ever faster on our shrinking planet. If we could grasp why so many people around the world are caught up in deadly conflicts with each other, ones which cost so much suffering to so many, would we want to know that? I spent a week in intensive study in Boulder, Colorado recently, sponsored by Spiral Dynamics Integral with the primary exponent of the Spiral Dynamics theory, Don Beck. The Missing Piece for Peacemakers? On of the main challenges for peacemakers is that we tend to apply one size fits all solutions. If you bad people (terrorists or bad governments, take your pick) would just stop your violent ways, the rest of us could live in peace.

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My Way or the High Way People get very ugly around election time. The natural polarizations in our societies get magnified. The drama of win/lose is in the air. People are insisting: “My way is the right way.” How Do We Find Common Ground? My sense is that the drive to be right is an urge to create safety, a predictable world where we can feel at home, and a way to try to create peace. With six billion points of view in the world, this strategy is unlikely to succeed.

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