How To Talk About Books You Have Not Read is a wonderful book by Pierre Bayard. The book can be read at two different levels as many books can. On one level it is a humorous book, a little like the book by Stephen Potter called One-Up-Manship, which had advice on how to impress people with one’s literary credentials even though one had never read the classics. Pierre Bayard, however, makes a very serious point - that no one will ever read all the books that they need to read or could read in their particular topic. It is far more important to know about a book and its core message, preferably in the author’s own words, and to understand how that book fits into the culture and relates to other books and concepts then not to know that a book existed.
The table below presents the Top Ten Books that are essential reading in this topic area. For each book there is the full reference, the Distilled Message (the essence of the book in the author’s own words) and Why Is This Book Important? Which summarises the relevance of the book and other related titles or key terminology.
- Trying Hard is Not Good Enough, Friedman.
- Mental Illness In The Community, Goldberg & Huxley.
- Death of the Guilds: Professions, States and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the present, Krause.
- Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Moore.
- Complexity in Primary Care, Kieran Sweeney.
- The Idea of Justice, Sen.
- Credit Crunch Healthcare: How Economics can save our publicly-funded health services, Donaldson.
- Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein.
- The Economics of Climate Change, Stern.
- General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, Von Bertalanffy.
|
Friedman, M. (2005) Trying hard is not good enough. |
|
|
Distilled message |
“common language; is not about english versus other languages. It’s about the fundamental need we have to understand what people mean when they say something. There is currently an appalling lack of discipline in how we use language when we work together on community wellbeing and program performance” The 7 population Accountability questions 1. What are the quality id life conditions we want for our children adults and families who live in our community? 2. What would those conditions look like if we could see them 3.How can we measure those conditions? 4.How are we doing on the most important of these measures 5.Who are the partners that have a role to play in doing better 6.What works to do better , including no-cost and low -cost ideas 7.What do we propose to do The 7 performance Accountability questions 1. Who are our customers? 2. How can we measure if our customers are better off 3. How can we measure if we are delivering services well? 4. How are we doing on the most important of these measures? 5. Who are the partners that have a role to play in doing better 6. What works to do better , including no-cost and low -cost ideas 7. What do we propose to do? |
|
Why is this book important?
|
The importance of this book, which is primarily about education and not healthcare, is that it describes very clearly the need to be accountable not only to those people in contact with the service but also to the whole population. The latter are those who provide the service, and those who do not receive the service even though their need is as great or greater than those in contact. A very important source book for population medicine. |
|
How does the key concept of this book relate to your experience |
|
|
How might this book and concept influence you to think or act differently in future |
|
|
Goldberg, D & Huxley, P. (1980) Mental illness in the community.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
Psychiatrists base their conconcepts of mental illness on the highly selected sample of patients who are referred to them and …this selection process is therefore important in determining who will receive help and what will be thought of as a psychiatric case p 159
There are still large areas of doubt and uncertainty in social psychiatry, but it is our contention that a consistent picture is beginning to emerge from the research of the last decade, made possible by the union of epidemiological method with operational criteria for defining the various syndromes of psychiatric disorder…we have argued that psychiatrists base their concepts of mental illness on the highly selected sample of patients who are referred to them, and that this selection process is therefore important both in determining who will receive help and in determining what will be thought of as a psychiatric case…the doctor himself is a very important variable in deciding on passage through the second and third filter.” |
|
Why is this book important?
|
This astonishing book was written in the 1970s when a group of psychiatrists working at The Maudsley Hospital started to identify different groups of patients, of people with mental health problems, in their population. They found a number of different levels of care and a number of “filters” through which patients passed or failed to pass.
Their work is of great importance to everyone who manages chronic disease.
This book was only the first to describe a population-based approach to clinical practice. Picking what might be regarded as one of the most difficult specialties, namely mental health, the authors clearly demonstrated the fact that people in need did not receive the care that was appropriate because of the existence of what they called “filters” between the different levels of care – between self-care and primary care, between primary care and specialist care, between inpatient care and care in the patient’s own home.
The book remains a model for all other clinical disciplines. |
|
Krause, E. (1999) Death of the guilds: Professions, states and the advance of capitalism, 1930 to the present.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
“Once again, it is important to emphasize that I am not saying that professions are dying. What is dying is their guild power-as this power is increasingly being replaced by the power of capitalists or the state or both together to control the nature and quality of the professional associations, the professional workplace, the professional marketplace, and the relation of profressional groups to the state…in the long run, the strength of the consumer – a potential fourth major force joining the triad of profession, state and capitalism-has remained minimal.” |
|
Why is this book important?
|
In this wide-ranging analysis, Elliot Krause considers the autonomy and leverage of modern professional groups---medicine, law, university teaching, and engineering---in the United States and four European countries over the past three decades. Finding that each group has experienced a decline in its power relative to that of state and capitalist institutions, Krause considers the implicatons for professionals and those they serve. |
|
Moore, M. (1997) Creating public value: Strategic management in government.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
“Politics is the answer that a liberal democratic
society has given to the (analytically unresolvable) question of what things
should be produced for collective purposes with public resource. “ Source: Moore, M.H. (1995) Creating Public Value. Harvard University Press (p.54) |
|
Why is this book important?
|
This book is a summation of 15 years of research on what public-sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Cases are used to illuminate their broader lessons for government managers. Mark Moore writes very clearly about the relationship between politicians and officials. While his work relates to American cities, police departments and planning and housing departments, his discussion focuses not only on what constitutes public value but also on the relationship between politicians and officials.
|
|
| |
|
Sen, A. (2009) The idea of justice.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
Justice is an immensely important idea that has moved people in the past and will continue to move people in the future. And reasoning and critical scrutiny can indeed offer much to extend the reach and to sharpen the content of this momentous concept. And yet it would be a mistake to expect that every decisional problem for which the idea of justice might conceivably be relevant would, in fact, be resolved through reasoned scrutiny. And it would also be a mistake to assume, as was discussed earlier, that since not all disputes can be resolved through critical scrutiny, we do not have secure enough grounds to use the idea of justice in those cases in which reasoned scrutiny yields a conclusive judgement. We go as far as we reasonably can. |
|
Why is this book important?
|
Is justice an ideal, forever beyond our grasp, or something that may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives?In this wide-ranging book, Amartya Sen presents an alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice which, despite their many specific achievements have taken us, he argues, in the wrong direction in general. At the heart of Sen’s argument is his insistence on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. But it is in the nature of reasoning about justice, argues Sen, that it does not allow all questions to be settled even in theory; there are choices to be faced between alternative assessments of what is reasonable; several different and competing positions can each be well-defended.Far from rejecting such pluralities or trying to reduce them beyond the limits of reasoning, we should make use of them to construct a theory of justice that can absorb divergent points of view. Sen also shows how concern about the principles of justice in the modern world must avoid parochialism, and further, address questions of global injustice. The breadth of vision, intellectual acuity and striking humanity of one of the world's leading public intellectuals have never been more clearly shown than in this remarkable book. |
|
Stern, N. (2007) The economics of climate change: The stern review. Stern.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
Adaption is a vital part of a response to the challenge of climate change. It is the only way to deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change to which the world is already committed, and additionally offers an opportunity at adjust economic activity in vulnerable sectors and support sustainable development. |
|
Why is this book important?
|
This is a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the economic aspects of climate change.
The debate about whether or not climate change is happening and, if it is, whether or not human activity is the principal cause continues to rage. Sterne is undoubtedly of the camp who believe that if is happening and it is happening because of human behaviour. However, he also very cleverly makes the argument that, even if you do not agree with him, many of the measures he proposes will save money and make the environment a better place to live, whatever your beliefs about global warming. |
|
von Bertalanffy, L. (2003) General system theory: Foundations, development, applications.
|
|
|
Distilled message |
“Entities of an essentially new sort are entering the sphere of scientific though. Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe – chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not – expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system, cell, mind, society – would result and be intelligible.” |
|
Why is this book important?
|
This is where many people would say systems thinking started, in biology with the writing of Ludwig von Bertalanffy - another great product of Vienna, like Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (try Wittgenstein's Poker).
An attempt to formulate common laws that apply to virtually every scientific field, this conceptual approach has had a profound impact on such widely diverse disciplines as biology, economics, psychology, and demography.
Von Bertalanffy developed general system theory. He was a distinguished biologist and a member of the famous Vienna Circle when Vienna was a hotbed of intellectual development in the 1930s.
Systems thinking really evolved from biology and, after the Second World War, by interaction with psychology and with people who were designing big mainframe computers.
A very good account of the evolution of systems thinking is given by Fritjof Kapra in his book The Web of Life. |
|
| |
