Editorial Reviews
Book Description
According to Jose Stevens and Lena Stevens, business leaders and shamans share many important traits: the ability to solve problems, achieve goals, see the big picture, and forecast events. What their previous book, Secrets of Shamanism, did for the growth of the individual, The Power Path does for the growth of business managers and entrepreneurs. Based on years of study with shamans, the book shares a new way of thinking about the nature of power. By applying shamanic traditions of power to the workplace, readers learn how to improve work relationships, understand employees’ strengths and limitations, and inspire effective teamwork — techniques aimed ultimately at increasing business success.
Pragmatic Shamanic Teaching Where It Is Needed Most, July 18, 2002 - Reviewer: Frank MacEowen from Washington, DC United States
Jose' is a Basque-Mexican-Irish American who, with his wife Lena, are some of the most sought after organizational consultants in the industry. What makes them unique is their thorough grounding in psychological understanding (Jose received a Ph.D. from the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, a true source of cutting-edge education), and they both have undergone shamanic apprenticeships.
This book is extremely timely given the current down-turn of our economy (which is going to get a lot worse before it gets better), and the old paradigms of business (which truly must undergo a transformation--see another book, The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and S. Anderson).
The Power Path is definitely not a book on puff-ball New Age spirituality. It pulls no punches, it is gritty and real, but is also astonshing in its capacity to convey the terrain of power and our relationship with it. This is no beating around the bush writing--pragmatic and practical, the teachings and ideas are deeply informed by their apprenticeship with Huichol shamans (they obviously paid attention)--but the ideas in The Power Path are also tested, refined, and applied in the very real domain of corporations where the issues of power are just as tangible and real as the issues of power a shaman faces in his or her training, and in his or her practice and service throughout life.
In my estimation The Power Path is one of the freshest articulations of the shamanic theory about power, energy, thought, and intention, all components that determine our own determination of our own destiny. What is extremely hopeful, I think, is the potential that these central teachings to the shamanic life at large can revolutionize the way we do business, the way we lead, the way we govern.
Frank MacEowen |
