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WORK TITLE: Parachuting Cats into Borneo
WORK NOTES: with Alan AtKisson
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1956
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY:
http://sustainabilitytransformation.com/our-team/ * http://www.chelseagreen.com/events?person=21020 * https://www.linkedin.com/in/axel-klimek-30705017/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1956.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Management consultant and writer. The Center for Sustainability Transformation, cofounder and managing director, 1992—; Axel Klimek 3p, Hofheim am Taunus, Germany, founder.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Axel Klimek, a practicing Buddhist for more than three decades, was trained as a psychotherapist and coach. He has dedicated his career to helping people and organizations change and transform their hidden potentials. Klimek is also the cofounder of an organization that works at helping leaders, organizations, and developmental programs manage complex change processes and improve their performance. His work has taken him to more than twenty-five countries on four continents. His clients have included the African Union Commission, Canon Europe, Levis, Lufthansa, Unilever, and T-Systems.
Klimek is coauthor with Alan AtKisson of Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Café. The book focuses on how to use proven strategies and practices to create transformation and build capacity on an individual, business, and social movement level. Klimek and AtKisson point out that a wide range of information has become available over the years on how to institute change. Nevertheless, they write that two-thirds of all change efforts ultimately fail to reach set goals. The authors’ goal is to help readers increase their chances for success.
Drawing from their experience in helping corporations, governments, and various networks and organizations reach their change goals, Klimek and AtKisson present a guide on how best to use system-based change tools. They begin by discussing the various reasons why change goals usually are not achieved. One thing AtKisson and Klimek caution against is overanalyzing an immediate problem and becoming stuck. Their goal is to help readers understand habitual patterns of thinking about a situation and how to critique these patterns and move beyond them.
Klimek and AtKisson provide advice to keep change initiatives on track by discussing how to foster action and find collaborators to help achieve change goals. They also emphasize the importance of finding the right level to focus on for incorporating change and how to help others work toward their own change goals. The authors close by discussing change in relation to the complex goal of sustainability and provide information on the proper tools that can help achieve a goal that features sustainability. The book’s title comes from an attempt by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1950s to induce positive change in Borneo via parachuting 14,000 cats into the country. The idea worked, deleting the burgeoning rat population that was spreading typhus and the plague while also providing the people with replacements for many of their pets that had died.
Parachuting Cats into Borneo is “an excellent collection of strategies to affirm and nourish practicing change-makers and a great tool-kit for anyone looking for ways to jump into the growing pool of sustainability leaders our world so needs,” wrote Seres Web site contributor Sherry Miller. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “AtKisson … and Klimek … offer a shrewd and discerning look at systemic change within organizations.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2016, review of Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Café, p. 202.
ONLINE
AtKisson Group Web site, http://atkisson.com/ (May 12, 2017), author profile.
Center for Sustainability Transformation Web site, http://sustainabilitytransformation.com/ (May 12, 2017), author profile.
Seres Web site, http://www.seres.org/ (February 3, 2017), Sherry Miller, review of Parachuting Cats into Borneo.
Axel Klimek is a senior management consultant, helping global organizations to manage complex change processes and improve their performance. Axel serves as CEO of Center for Sustainability Transformation GmbH, a standalone spin-off from AtKisson Inc. and the AtKisson Group’s professional training and development division. He is also the founder of Axel Klimek 3p, which helps clients achieve sustainability through cultural change processes, innovation, cooperation, strategic planning, and change management. One of his main focus areas is how sustainability can be integrated into the value chain of an organisation and can become a habitual part of the perception, decision making process and actions of its leaders, managers and staff.
Axel Klimek is the cofounder and managing director of the Center for Sustainability Transformation. He has worked in more than twenty-five countries on four continents, and within a wide spectrum of contexts—helping leaders, organizations, and developmental programs manage complex change processes and improve their performance. His clients have included the African Union Commission, Canon Europe, EY, PWC, Allianz, GIZ, Lufthansa, Unilever, and T-Systems. He lives in Germany.
Axel Klimek is is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Center for Sustainability Transformation. Axel has worked in more than 25 different countries on 4 continents, and within a wide spectrum of contexts; helping leaders, organizations, and developmental programs manage complex change processes and improve their performance. Recently he also began assisting national-level change programs. His clients have included the African Union Commission, Canon Europe, Levis, EY, PWC, GIZ, Lufthansa, Unilever, and T-Systems.
Axel’s practice is centered upon helping clients achieve sustainability through change processes, innovation, cooperation, strategic planning, change management, and building a coaching culture. One of his main areas of focus is on how sustainability can be integrated into the value chain of an organization to become a habitual part of consciousness; informing decision-making processes, and the actions of leaders, managers, and staff members.
Axel has had a strong interest and passion for the topic of transformation ever since his time at university. He’s been a practicing Buddhist for over 35 years, studying the transformation of the mind. Thirty years ago he was trained as a psychotherapist and coach and has since been working to help individuals and teams change, transform, and uplift their hidden potentials. In 1999, Axel joined a management consultancy to offer his support to companies and organizations undergoing complex change processes.
Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Cafe
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p202.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Cafe
Axel Klimek and Alan AtKisson. Chelsea Green, $24.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-60358681-8
AtKisson (Believing Cassandra) and Klimek, cofounders of the Center for Sustainability Transformation, offer a shrewd and discerning look at systemic change within organizations and the many obstacles to such change. The coauthors do not claim to have a one-size-fits-all solution, rather telling the reader that the "answers are already there within yourself' or close at hand, among your colleagues. However, they do urge readers to shift the odds in their favor by building on existing knowledge, seeking out new viewpoints, becoming more mindful of ingrained habits, and focusing on their strengths and resources. Klimek and AtKisson offer up "four big questions": "What basic beliefs do we have?"; "What method do we have for supporting a system to move from state A to state B?"; "What is our relationship to the system?"; and "How can we increase the capacity of the system not just to change but to improve performance?" Elsewhere, they identify seven different ways of approaching change, including "following apian," "negotiating an outcome," and "enforcing the future." They close with insightful chapters on supporting others, coaching, and leadership that will be particularly valuable when initiating change but should be equally beneficial to daily work life. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Cafe." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 202+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287574&it=r&asid=80f5a0556068cc0eb3800da954965e17. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287574
Book Review: Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Café
Posted on February 3, 2017 Categories: Book Reviews, Change Makers, Climate Change Adaptation, Communiversity, Education, Resilient Communities, Uncategorized, Youth Leaders No comments yet
Parachuting Cats into Borneo: And Other Lessons from the Change Café
By Axel Klimek and Alan AtKisson, 2016.
SERES champion Sherry Miller with SERES facilitators and change agents.
Yes! It’s true. In the 1950s the World Health Organization (WHO) supported a call to create positive change in Borneo by parachuting 14,000 cats into the country! With their somewhat surprising arrival, the cats significantly helped decrease the rat population that was raising havoc, spreading typhus and plague. The people were also happy to have their feline friends back, most of whom had died eating geckos full of poisoned insects intimately tied to the outbreak of malaria, via mosquitoes hooked up with parasitic wasps and DDT-infected caterpillars–talk about the interconnectedness of life!
Yes! It’s true. The co-founders of the Center for Sustainability Transformation, Axel Klimek and Alan AtKisson, chose to title their new book after this classic example of creative transformation using systemic thinking and bold risk-taking for the greater good. I found this to be an excellent collection of strategies to affirm and nourish practicing change-makers and a great tool-kit for anyone looking for ways to jump into the growing pool of sustainability leaders our world so needs.
Working with empowered and transformative youth leaders via SERES here in Guatemala and El Salvador, I am delighted to be able to share this book with them and invite them to think about how they are thinking about and advocating change in their local communities, countries and ultimately, the world.
I love the way Axel and Alan use the Change Cafe model via invitations throughout the book to stop and think, to make it personal, to dig deeper inside and let the change emerge first in “me” before “we”. The book is more like a conversation than a lecture. It brings energy, deep pause, companionship, inspiration and motivation to the reader as few books I’ve ever read do. It makes me want to start a living book group to hold it, dance with it, nest in it and then go forth with even greater confidence, believing, “Yes, we can build/create/write a new story and become a healthier, more peaceful and truly sustainable world!”
The four basic questions they explore with us in this book that they consider crucial for a successful change process to occur include:
What basic beliefs do we have, as change agents, about the process of changing systems?
What method (or methods) do we have for supporting a system to move from state A to state B?
What is our relationship to the system?
How can we increase the capacity of the system to not just change but actually improve performance?
I highly recommend you explore their answers to these questions in which they share multiple strategies, deep wisdom, clear conviction and most of all, an invitation to find your own “change- maker” within. Nourished by both the proven tools and deep personal learning this book offers, I believe more than ever that together we can navigate the uncertainty, complexity and increasing ways we can connect virtually as well as face to face as we build our capacity for creating transformation in today’s world for tomorrow’s children–I mean, why not?!
Review by Sherry Miller, Ed.D.
SERES Global Ambassador