Peter Koenig : 'moneywork', Money Seminars and more...

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Hello and welcome!

My present energy, time and money is invested in http://summitofsummits.org with an accompanying brief pdf text which I'd ask you to read if you'd like to help with this.

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But if you're here otherwise...

Privileged with early entrepreneurial successes as a young man I started researching the relationship to money in the early 1980s to satisfy my own curiosity. To my surprise I couldn't find anyone in acadaemia or in business who had yet performed comprehensive research on how the relationship to money affects people and organizations — let alone in society and civilization.  To explain how money can on the one hand lead toward materialization of goals, success and happiness, yet on the other so frequently appears as the cause of the opposite.  This not just with those at the poverty end of the spectrum but also those with considerable wealth and apparent power.
So started a period of "Action Research" with small groups over a 10 year period.

The challenge was to develop a conceptual framework within which any person can themselves elicit, see and understand the particular behaviour patterns they've adopted in relation to money and work, usually from outside influences at a very young age. These are normally invisible to the person themselves, like water to a fish, because each pattern is so 'normal', self-reinforcing and longheld that without giving it this focus of inquiry it gives the person the impression of being set for life.
After a clear diagnosis of each pattern however, on offer is also a simple method to help the person change or expand it if they wish, especially where they find it limiting rather than facilitating their ability to realize their personal or professional goals.
This is 'the moneywork', now represented in several countries by an expanding community of practitioners who offer consulting, coaching, seminars and trainings/master classes.

What you'll find in this site is an 'archive' of items I've selected for relatively quickly deepening your knowledge as an introduction to this topic.  What you'll read first below was a "temporary posting" in 2006 and though the financial landscape has been through enormous changes since then the content is virtually unchanged. The reason for this is that my focus has always concerned itself with shedding light on the longer-term dynamics. And these don't change so fast. Whether you’re a financial expert or novice you’re likely to find new stuff here since the content has been researched from first principles. 

Peter Koenig, 2024

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You can start by clicking on
Who is 'moneywork' for? This will give you a brief indication of whether the remainder of this website will be interesting for you.

And here a short continuing guide:
The Subliminal Messages about money.  Check out to what extent these apply to you and how they set the frame of (y)our everyday economic environment.

Then have a  look and a laugh at my list of
Favourite Quotations by famous people, followed by

The short History of Money.  Written in 1998, 14 years into my research I leave it unchanged as the history has remained the same and you’ll see the part that’s prophetic is realising itself.   Optional is a brief subset of conclusions on the Future of Money, drafted at a workshop in 2001 and again prophetic. And for those interested exclusively in deepening their knowledge on design of monetary systems there are links to my favourite experts on the subject.

All this should be readable in 5 minutes.

However the 'moneywork' relates to more than the surface designs of these money systems.  The central focus of it has been to understand the underlying human dynamics that have led to their specific creation, individually and collectively. Because money, unlike something in nature - a tree or your liver - is a human creation. So if we could create it, it must be possible for us to fathom, understand and explain how it affects us. This was the basic premise of my research.

ff you’re interested to explore this deeper here is what’s on offer:

1. “30 Lies about Money”, a short book based on working with hundreds of real, live situations in money fora and seminars. It contains the essentials to help you understand your own particular relation to money and free you to do (even) more of what you want to do be doing than presently.  At the same time you’ll understand better why things run the way they run in the organisations you’re associated with, at work, home, in your financial partnerships personal and professional, and in the world as a whole.

2. A series of seminars, presentations and trainings with the same purpose as 30 Lies about Money: 
- Money Seminars for Individuals enabling you to research first, and then consciously develop your own particular monetary path, congruent with your life goals.
- A Money Seminars for Couples, as above but focussed on the relationship
- A Money Training for Coaches, Consultants and Therapists, to integrate the methodology developed in the book and money seminars, into their work with clients
- A Money Seminar for Executive Teams, custom-designed, especially for those aspiring to be part of values-oriented enterprises.
Since 2011 these seminars are being offered by a variety of practitioners in a number of languages and countries. For a first selection please see Calendar

Should you have an interest in "Money and Spirituality” I set out a special description of this work so you can see how these are interlinked. Included is “10 Theses”, a controversial perspective on the present state of the world, humanity’s part and the role of money - prepared for a monetary reform conference in 2005. Again this is short and quick to read.

Thank you for your interest.

Peter Koenig

http://peterkoenig.typepad.com/eng/programcalendar/index.html

peterkoenigsystem®

 

Who is 'moneywork' for?

The current structures relating to money and work in Western civilisation along with the institutions holding them in place date back to the Enlightenment three to four hundred years ago. What we now call capitalism and the industrial revolution were consciously put in place by enlightened leaders of that time to spur scientific and technological progress and the advance of material wellbeing. This part of mankind’s history must be seen as an extraordinary success. From railroads to central heating, motor cars, pharmaceuticals, the internet, fibre optics, cellphones and biotechnology there is noone alive today who doesn’t somehow benefit from this remarkable period.

With the gradual conclusion of this era however we are now bumping up against a simultaneous convergence of social, financial, economic and ecological limits as predicted in the 1970s by the Club of Rome. An increasing number of people are becoming aware that the very behaviours that provided solutions to earlier problems are not only unable to resolve the crises of today but successively showing themselves to be an integral part of today’s problems. It’s clearly necessary to stop and reflect, time for radical re-thinking and re-acting in the most fundamental way. Coming from an integrated perspective that doesn’t reject the past or react to it or any of its present institutions but seeks new ways forward, on a contemporary par to the enlightened thinkers, actors and leaders of 300 or 400 years ago.

To re-start from a quasi blank slate however is easier said than done. Even the seemingly most modern, latest hi-tech organizations and successes are at base still operating out of the same old model.

Peter Koenig who in the early 1980’s was pioneering vision and organizational transformation processes for companies discovered that the relationship to money, time and work has become so deeply ingrained culturally and globally, that a mere intellectual understanding of this fact and of contemporary world issues, no matter how brilliant, how well-defined and how much discussed in Davos and other Think Tanks, is inadequate to dissolve the drives of this embodied and embedded conditioning. In short, change projects that fail to include the relation to money as an integral part of the process, automatically and inadvertently recreate the status quo.

The ‘moneywork’ he pioneered represents more than 30 years research and development from scratch of a simple and refined methodological tool to enable individuals and organizations to break out of this box. It enables people to free themselves successively from these drives, so to be able to respond increasingly freely and creatively to the conditions and circumstances they’re presented with. The person’s relation to money is used as the entry point to this work, because in this relation is so much valuable information on the particular characteristics of the conditioning that leads to set and driven behaviour patterns, not just with money but with other life aspects too. Indeed, the ‘moneywork’ laps over automatically into other life areas because the relation to money normally winds its way into all other aspects of a person’s life. Relation to work, to time, family, health etc., etc.

So also into the person’s professional life, business and the organizations in which he or she takes part. Koenig maintains that it’s impossible for organizations to transform, for values-based initiatives to take root, for spiritual movements to be really spiritual, for politics to be ethical, for economics to be a science, for contemporary global challenges to be competently handled, without leaders who are willing to examine their relation to money head-on. The ‘moneywork’ is therefore for leaders in any of these fields who recognise sovereignty as a capital word, who feel ready to be led into this challenge, and who really mean business.

The Role of Source

The 'Role of Source' is an ongoing work-in-progress since 2009, researching the principles by which founders organize and materialize their enterprises, projects and initiatives.  The research is not 'scientific', in the sense of departing from a preconceived hypothesis and seeking to test this, rather empirical and 'postconceived', in the sense of starting from zero, listening to founders' stories and experiences, attempting to distill out and describe the common, universal threads; submitting the distillation to test in further iterations. (cf. 'Action Research', Kurt Lewin).

The significance of this work is not in its discovery of anything new, but in its emphasis on attempting to articulate and make transparent 'source principles' of organization and materialization that have always been present, and are universal. This as a helpful alternative or complementary lens to conventional management principles which have been successful in the industrial era for creating economies of scale in linear goods production but now in the digital age hit serious limits. (In short, the 'source principles' are perennial whereas conventional management principles are simply a temporary subset, very useful for the last 350 years but limited).

The key subjects the 'sourcework' research is starting to reveal are on:
1. Order. The natural order of organization from the founding moment of an initiative; in terms of the positioning of engaged people to the founder (or linear successor of the founder) and to each other, natural, flowing emergence and materialization
2. Collaboration. The basic conditions of satisfaction that appear have to be fulfilled, in order for collaborations to succeed well
3. Succession. The elements of process that result in a succession where the torch is really passed, and the telltale signs to indicate this has happened, or not.

While still in a young state with lots more to research the 'lens' offered by this research can be, and is already being, very effectively used to: 
- explain and understand why and how organization flows well and easily when this happens instinctively; in order to consciously replicate this state
- quickly and precisely identify, understand the consequences of, and introduce corrections, where the natural order is not followed. Likewise where intended collaborations or successions have failed to materialize.

For more details see  < A Little Red Book about Source >
Or please visit the website for an introduction and contact if further interested.