Books published by Common Ground Publishing

Bringing together creative people to develop fresh, new, innovative ideas and to propel a business forward is challenging work. It isn''t enough to simply follow policy and procedure, or to gently nudge creative people toward success. It takes strength, courage, and insight into how creative people work, live, and respond.Creative Leadership expert Anthony Lake unravels the mystery of the creative employee by using simple yet elegant cases in business and the arts to frame this practical guide for Leading the Creative Mind. Born from his executive work with arts organizations, his consulting, and his leadership research, Lake creates a series of exercises designed to strengthen skills for leading creative individuals. The focus is on four key pillars for success:1. Reflecting and Engaging Sensitively with Creative People2. Designing Effective Creativity Teams3. Developing and Addressing Real Challenges4. Fixing Ailing Work GroupsThis is a guide for keeping inspired, balancing innovation with effective communication, and collaborating from a position of leadership.

Sport is all about play and game, aesthetic and strength, passion and emotion, challenge and rivalry. But because sometimes players and fans look for a little extra help from God, gods, spirits or any other Supreme Being, sport is also a matter of beliefs and Faith. Often, sport uses religion if the sport itself does not become a religion first.In Montreal, the fans'' passion and emotion benefits the Montreal Canadiens, the oldest and the most victorious National Hockey League team.Since 2008, the Protestant Theologian Olivier Bauer, a former hockey goaltender, is carefully studying the religious aspects of the Montreal Canadiens. In his book, Olivier Bauer reveals how the Montreal Canadiens becomes a religion, specifies which kind of religion it is, and explains how it is interrelated with Quebec''s Catholicism. From a theological point of view, he analyses two ways of practicing the Montreal Canadiens Religion, shows why both ways are idolatry, denounces the weakness of such a religion, and pleads for an evangelical use of the Montreal Canadiens.Based on the Montreal Canadiens, Olivier Bauer explains how sport becomes a religion, but he also critics the religion that sport offers.

Enough for All Forever is a handbook for learning about sustainability. It has been written specifically for educators: classroom practitioners; school and system administrators and managers; those who develop curriculum; academics; and others who share the goal of environmental equity for all. It is about integrating sustainability into teaching and learning at all levels.The focus of the book is how to live sustainably, in harmony with a planet that has finite resources. This is not a 'one size fits all' handbook. Rather, it is a broad collection of work from over fifty different authors, all of them experts in their field and all committed to doing something about sustainability.

Michel Foucault once expressed his disagreement with the "breach" between social history and the history of ideas brought about by the assumption that the former is concerned with how people act without thinking, while the latter analyses how people think without acting. "People both think and act",he says, by way of a sarcasm consisting in having to point out the obvious.While in complete agreement with Foucault on this as on several other issues, the author of this book chooses to emphasise another "obviousness" of at least equal importance: that thoughts and (material) actions may well be inseparable in all fields of human/social existence, but they are not the same thing. The maintenance of the distinction between subjectivity/conceptuality on one hand and objectivity /materiality on the other constitutes a fundamental premise for the book's two closely interrelated goals: to criticise certain extremely influential currents of contemporary thought more or less loosely associated with "poststructuralism" and/or "postmodernism" which, each in its own fashion, have served to undermine this distinction; and to provide a philosophical /theoretical grounding for the methodology of the social sciences known as "discourse analysis". The importance of the latter is shown to consist in forming a methodological framework for a materialist critique that would escape both the economic reductionism of Marxism and the implicit (or manifest) idealism pertaining to all variations of Hegelianism.