Encounters with the "Other"

"This writing is a gift! Encounters with the Other must be placed in every teacher's and student's hands beginning as early as 6th or 7th grade, woven into their history and social studies programs to help future generations recognize the signs that keep repeating themselves around the world and in our own communities."

Lily Bowen, VP Leadership & OD at Travelers Insurance, USA

"Thank you so much for this. I read it all and it moved me to tears. There is so much that needs to be done and sometimes the task seems hopeless, but we need to keep striving and, in the process, making small changes that will hopefully grow into a powerful wave of 'humanity.'"

Salman Ahmad, Lecturer at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

"At the end of this little book, Barry Oshry says there's a middle way of building community â'- not pure power or love, but mutual self-awareness. That's been the core theme of his work ever since Seeing Systems: watching people shift roles from Top to Bottom to Middle to Customer. They see their own behavior shift accordingly, and that's the first step. Barry has been a prophet of systems awareness for all his career."               

Art Kleiner, Author of The Age of Heretics and The Wise Advocate

"A wholeness resulting from a cycle of Love and Power, which allows us to see both the similarities and differences with others as they really are, is a profound insight. Balancing the forces of Power and Love is the most important work we can do as individuals and as a society."

George B. Forsythe, Ph.D., Brigadier General, U.S. Army (retd.)

"Written in the style of an epic poem, this is a lament for what ails the modern world and, in particular, the way we treat each other as means and not ends; and it is a moving elegy for a world yet to be created, where love matches power."

Jules Goddard, Fellow, London Business School

"Oshry describes so simply, so clearly, core dynamics of being in relation with others â' the dynamics that are just as relevant in one-on-one relationships as between two cultures. The power in revealing these patterns is that once you see them, they are hard to forget."      

âNaryan Wong, Network Weaver, Toronto, Canada

"Barry Oshry, despite his esteem in certain circles, is perhaps the most under-appreciated thinker of our times with regard to human organisation and society. I have often wondered why this is the case, and my conclusion is that this is because he has gone deeper and found a purer essence than most. So, I have only one exhortation for those lucky enough to read this: see this prose poem not as perspective or opinion, but as a scientific project; an attempt to divine a deep human truth, through observation and theory. See the dynamics he identifies as fundamental building blocks, as a true paradigm of human behaviour. To do so is illuminating and empowering."

Benjamin P. Taylor, Managing Partner, RedQuadrant, U.K

"Barry Oshry is one of those rare and intriguing characters: an actual original thinker. For years he has done groundbreaking research on what makes us tick. The answer, it turns out, is that our personalities are shaped far more than we might like by the systems we live in. The challenge, then, is to understand and master these conditions to live a healthy and productive life."

Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief, Harvard Business Review