Mieke Jacobs

This book calls for a new approach to M&A. It’s an invitation to confront the unacknowledged questions that so often cripple M&A success. What is the M&A an excuse for? How do we mourn what is lost? Through their questions, Mieke and Paul surface what lies unspoken beneath every system. They name the huge identity shift M&A so often entails. This is a powerful guide to thinking more broadly and deeply about successful integration. Through it, the authors help us begin to identify and understand the constellations in our own organizations.

For me, her final words hold the essence of the book: ‘To read of mankind is to mourn mankind. To write of mankind is to fertilize humanity’
Maybe this Haiku can serve as a bow to Mieke and her beautiful writing:
words like a sharp moon,
piercing softly through the flesh
what dares not be said.

Poet Assassin is a song from the space between worlds—an alchemical weaving of myth, memory, and soul. With the precision of a priestess and the voice of an oracle, Mieke Jacobs invites us into a realm where silence is sacred and every word is a spell. These poems are portals—each one a threshold between the visible and the unseen, the fractured and the whole

Reading a line in Mieke’s book only once is easy. It’s short. Reading it a second time – with the heart – and a third time – truly allowing it in takes courage. Something might die. Something new might begin to move. In the tradition of David Whyte and the old Haiku masters, her poetry is an offering, an invitation to remember: we are like clay, made of formless, non-clay things, forming and becoming what we are not yet, only to become formless again.

A remarkably perceptive understanding of why sensible M&A deals go wrong, and how to get them back on track. This extraordinary work answers a burning question for leaders: “What on earth is happening here, and why?” In every chapter Mieke and Paul pose fascinating questions you haven’t asked before, giving you new insights you haven’t had before. You will finally understand how your organization really works, and how to help it flourish. Simply brilliant.

Each poem is a portal—fierce, tender, and exquisitely true.

Paul and Mieke are two of the leading thinkers in the field of systemic intelligence and organizational constellations. In Emergent, they apply their experience and insights to mergers and acquisitions. Through their useful frameworks and real client stories, they provide a window into the underlying dynamics that derail these efforts and offer practical solutions to unleash the full integration potential. Having benefited personally and professionally from the power of their work, and having been touched by their sense of humanity, I will rely upon their wisdom for years to come. I encourage you to place their book at the top of your reading list.

She holds our attention, we are all in silence. She opens with the first line from her poem Eden:
‘Upon this rock you built your church’

A mix of reverence and irreverence for the original verse from Matthew 16:18, you feel the potency of her words like they were tastes off an exquisite menu. This is poetry reimagined, created to have a felt sense, a direct experience in your body, not just words on a page.

Mieke, wat heb je een ontroerend mooi boek geschreven. Wat een moed en kwaliteit. Ik heb het opgevreten in de hoop dat het niet zou eindigen. Jouw boek laat me voelen waarom ik zo van schrijven houd, van rake woorden en bloedmooie zinnen. Een aanrader voor wie de nacht kan verdragen!

Nachtboek is een knap geschreven dagboek-bij-nacht, vol sterke verhalen verteld vanuit een originele invalshoek doordat zij haar eigen leefwereld projecteert tegen de achtergrond van haar indrukwekkend gevarieerde leeswereld. De eeuwenoude raamvertelling – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decamerone – revisted and updated als het ware. Het is een emotioneel zeer zwaar geladen belijdenis, alsof geschreven onder een onweerstaanbare drang. Een verzachtende omstandigheid, wellicht, voor haar soms boude uitspraken.

The field of poetry has the potential to be a portal to a regenerative and flourishing realm. Mieke is a master in braiding her strands of wisdom and grace into a magnetic opus. An interflow of myth and lived encounter.

Met Nachtboek levert Mieke Jacobs een volstrekt uniek boek af. Een verzameling verhalen zo divers en toch herken je de hand van Jacobs telkens opnieuw. Haar schrijfstijl gaat van indringend en puur naar bijna poëtisch, maar is in alle vormen fraai. Het is in elk geval van een echtheid waar je van onder de indruk raakt, een kwetsbaarheid die nog enige bij je blijft.