Who is margaret wheatley

It is, because the other people go what the, is she saying? So I got more focused on what I have mentioned a few times of: So what are the dynamics that shape our behavior? So when I wrote So Far From Home , that book really brought together everything I could see as societal dynamics that are intersecting. There is no such thing as simple cause and effect.

So when you start looking at multiple causes that lead to something very visible like poor leadership or the return of command and control leadership or the incredible march of measurement in thinking that numbers describe reality, all of which is only increasing in the world now, where did that come from?

Is the issue lack of models of effective leadership? Is the issue lack of good ideas, lenses, program? I want us to redefine what the problem is here. The problem is not lack of good leadership models. How did you define this problem? Well, I have two views. It is possible. But now when I have done it a few times in the past year or two, I have to warn people that this is going to be very depressing. You put up the mind map. But generally, most people—this is something I did put in one of my books.

SCARPINO: I want to ask you a question about your developmental journey and we are going to come back to that, but I keep thinking about the person who you must have been when you worked on Leadership and the New Science published in and then the person you were becoming when you wrote the following in If we expect life to change, we have an easier time of letting go.

We did three or four a year at Sundance where I now live to introduce people to self-organizing systems and the whole theory of living systems. And we did it quite rigorously because we had Fritjof Capra with us and a chemist. This plant manager was a chemist as well. But then I also had. So, Hassidic Jews, Christians, everyone gravitated to that book in particular as a very spiritual work.

So the science was very supportive of Buddhist wisdom, which is much older. I was told early on with New Science by Willis Harman, one of the co-founders of the Institute of Noetic Science, and Willis was really one of my first mentors in this field, and he and I were speaking together at a college small group conversation and he just advised me.

Working with the head of the US Army gave me a lot of credibility when that book first came out. But I want to stay with the question and go back to that. But I had pretty traditional notions of God and Jesus as a young woman, and then it started to expand and become much more mystical.

I have to say the most blessed relationship of my life, yes. She loved Leadership and the New Science. She and I became dear friends. I also have a Tibetan teacher, which in my tradition you need a true Tibetan.

So I want to go back to something that you said earlier. You mentioned that women talk to you. In what ways do you think women think of leadership and practice leadership differently than men? Meetings run by women, unless they are in a corporation and they have to play it harder than the men, but meetings run by women are always a shock to men who are there. I mean, I have talked to a lot of them. Now that has a downside, of course. Where did that come from?

Grassi was his last name; wonderful renaissance scholar kind of man. I never got smart enough fast enough to go thank her before she died. No, I think this is a very important point. We need to be aware of those who have influenced us and we need to thank them. I enjoyed it a lot talking to them, so it was kind of a gift.

Your friends are harder than I am. Because I once led a group with a question that still is for me the best question you can possibly ask of us, which is: What is the one bedrock belief that supports, leads to all of your work? What is the belief that if it were not true, it would just tear apart at the very foundation of your work?

And for me it was: My belief in the human spirit is what I hold as an act of faith. We are in great fear of the other. But, in the midst of all of that, I want those of us who are willing to be what I call in So Far From Home warriors for the human spirit.

I know what I want to support. I know what I want to fight for. Warrior, I use it in the Tibetan sense of one who is brave, which is also true of other cultures as well, but one who protects and defends, not aggressively, though. We talked a little bit about your family and growing up and your teacher who did the multiplication tables with the shiny rocks as rewards and so on.

Where did you go to high school? And it was a brand new school. I graduated in , so you work back six years. While you were in high school, did you have any idea of where you imagined your life would go when it was over? What did you think your future would hold? I knew I was a good writer.

I knew I was a social activist, but still it was very insulated. But I also, I had a great interest in science and I was really encouraged in that. But I never—I just had great freedom.

When I look back at my life, one of the things that was unconscious but true was I was very brave about going into new situations and speaking up for people and causes and very outspoken. Kennedy was coming through our city on the way to New York on a train. They used to speak off the back of trains; well, they still do that right now. Our senior class was, none of us were allowed to leave school to go see him.

And I remember calling up the superintendent of education for Yonkers because my mother was head of the PTA and he knew me and he worked closely with her, so I had that in. We should be allowed to go see him. And I was very depressed, but really studied hard and then I found my liberation in going off to Europe for a year as a junior.

You were expected to study and I was only in one advanced AP course, which was biology. They were very rare. I had high expectations and there were high expectations placed on me, but it was a totally different environment than now.

I was part of the Honor Society. I was the vice president. I was never at the top. I was always second. That stayed true for all my college career, but I loved what I was studying. Look in the mirror and not want to disappoint people? And my biology teacher was terribly disappointed in me. I majored in the history of ideas, American intellectual history. Plus a love of poetry, literature, science, geology. The longer I have been at work, the more I understand, wow, I got a great foundation at the time.

They had some of the top scholars in history and philosophy and English. And I spent more of the, I was there for 10 months and I figured out I spent five months traveling. Only now, well a few years ago, I realized this is the pattern of my life; I teach myself. So I read up about art history and history, and then I just traveled alone or with another woman student.

We hitchhiked all over Europe, which you could do in those days. I was incensed by that. I got a wonderful education, but I gave it to myself. It was my first experience of working with group dynamics in our training program. And probably I developed an interest in group process during that training program. Then Korea itself was such a hard, but then rich experience. She came over to America years later and lived with me.

They could only hang out with the women. I hung out with the men, which suited me fine in terms of power and authority. So it was a formation experience for sure. They shared desks. They wore military uniforms. They came from outlying areas in the countryside. They were quite poor, but went on to influential positions.

You had to. Oh yes. Very difficult language, though. One of the hardest, but I learned to get by. Because I and my roommate, another Peace Corps volunteer, we both signed up to extend and they sent us home for six weeks. On the night I was flying back to Korea, I was with my very radical relatives in Berkeley, California, watching the Chicago Democratic Convention and the people getting beaten.

So two months later, started the journey home, but also did three weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to come home. It was a really choice experience because it was a slow moving coal-fired steam engine. It was like going through the Wild West for a good part of it, and it was three weeks on a train.

We got off. We visited a school. We were called peace thugs wearing, no thugs wearing peace masks. And it was a time of great tension. But I did get threatened in Australia a few years ago as a Guion spiritualist in an audience of Catholic teachers where there were these demonstrators—we had been warned about them—outside protesting me speaking and a radical environmentalist priest from South America.

This is in the beautiful countryside of Australia in North Victoria, I think it was. First of all, and I have said to many of my Peace Corps friends, what a privilege it was to live in a traditional culture before globalization. And it was post war so they were very grateful for Americans. But everything was foreign. As we left, my colleague there, Beverley, and I, as we got in the train to come home and we were sobbing.

I was in Mexico with a group and suddenly we were going out to a remote area and I feel so at home, like my work in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Korea has their own alphabet, Hangul, but they used a lot of Chinese characters as well. And I studied Chinese brush calligraphy and I studied taekwondo and really integrated into the culture. When I came back from Korea and was teaching junior-senior high school, just for a semester at my old school before I went onto leading educational programs, but in my tenth grade class I was sent from Korea a copy of the magazine called Human Weapon.

It had my picture on the front cover. So I just passed it around the class, and I got instant respect. You were in Berkeley in , which Berkeley was really at the heart of the social culture movement. I mean obviously enough to want to come home, but. It had become all Puerto Rican and black; changed greatly from my life as a youth there. Then it became the era of the Great Society so there was lots of money for programs.

I developed some really good educational programs for kids and got into community work with a very skilled community developer. And then went on to a more formal structure, because we were housed in a church basement as most community programs I think still are. But I learned a lot then and had my office taken over by radical blacks at one point who got angry at me. So I was just living in that milieu. I then went on to lead educational programs for adults who were trying to finish college who were minority group adults.

So I was more comfortable working with Puerto Rican and black citizens, for sure. And I also went and taught for the summer at the College of the Virgin Islands, which was a program just for less privileged black kids there to get into college. So I was always in this, this racial places of racial tension and I experienced it a lot. It was no fun getting your office taken over. It felt really unjust.

But I lived these things firsthand. He died a few years ago. He had published a book with a co-author called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Then he wrote another book the opposite, Teaching as a Conservative Activity. So that has become such another foundational piece to my work, is now looking at the impact of social media, smart phones, and the internet on; its impact on our culture, which I did cover in So Far From Home in But it was a fun program and it was just so eye opening and fresh.

He was like a talk show host. He would bring in really big name people to talk to us and, again, it was informal. I just remember it being such a wonderful, personal experience with Neil and the others. I went there deliberately.

I was advised to look into that. And it was just a great blessing. And then I wanted to go into the doctoral program there. I did a year of doctoral work in a fellowship program at NYU that introduced me to organizational behavior. They had no idea what they were doing around organizational behavior, but they had gotten this big federal grant with the Great Society affluence. What were their behaviors? How did you feel working for them?

What kind of worker were you, including the quality of what you produced? How do you feel about them now? Recall your own moments when you were proud of the leadership either formal or informal you provided to your organization, family, friends, community.

What did you do? How did you behave toward others? What were the results of your leadership? Are you still in a relationship with any of these people? Know thyself. What may be less clear in these wise expressions is the reason we learn to know ourselves: we develop a knowledge of self so that we can give up the self and serve others.

All Quotes Add A Quote. Books by Margaret J. Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Turning to One Another ratings. Who Do We Choose to Be? Perseverance ratings. Welcome back. I have two adult sons and have raised five stepchildren, all seven from the same father. There are 21 grandchildren and counting and three great-grandchildren.

My family, friends and work bring me joy, and so does the time I spend in the true quiet of wilderness or wandering deep in the red rock canyons of Utah. Warrior Training in Italy, May Edmonton Public Library, December With Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit.

Teaching with Pema Chodron at Omega Institute. Presenting with Musician Barbara McAfee. Meg Wheatley and Pema Chodron. T hroughout our existence, people have told stories as a way to understand our place in the universe and shape our action.

When a radically different perspective emerges, it can spark our imaginations and revolutionize how we live. Despite this paradox, Margaret Wheatley, author, teacher, and radical thinker, has pursued the path of storytelling for more than three decades. In her most recent book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time Berrett-Koehler, , she richly articulates how the insights of modern science—as well as those from primal wisdom traditions, indigenous tribes, spiritual thought, and poets old and new—can usher in a new era of human and planetary health.

According to Wheatley, these insights are forcing us to question, and hopefully discard, a year-old worldview that still dominates Western culture today. This outdated story emerged during the Industrial Age, when scientific discoveries gave rise to the idea that humankind could gain mastery over physical matter. Soon, the image of the universe as a grand, clocklike machine took hold, as well as the belief that we could engineer human beings, organizations, and life itself to perform however we directed them to.

Over time, the machine image has had a pernicious effect on how we think of ourselves and others. We created ourselves devoid of spirit, will, passion, compassion, emotions, even intelligence…. The imagery is so foreign to what we know and feel to be true about ourselves that it seems strange that we ever adopted this as an accurate description of being human.

But we did, and we do. The mechanistic story not only ignores the deep realities of human existence, says Wheatley, but makes exhausting demands on leaders. If people have no internal capacity for self-creation, self-organization, or self-correction, then leaders must constantly motivate, inspire, and organize them.

In short, leaders are responsible for everything. The new story takes the burden off of leaders to run our organizations and puts it back where it belongs—on each of us.

It offers a worldview in which creative self-expression and the embracing of systems of relationships are the organizing energies.

It looks at humans and the organizations in which they work as living systems— with the capacity to move toward greater complexity and order as needed.

And it offers the radical perspective that organization is a process, not a structure. In these systems, change is the organizing force, not a problematic intrusion.