Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time [Hardcover]

Margaret J. Wheatley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

Though management expert Margaret Wheatley works with an unusually broad variety of clients from Fortune 100 CEOs to ministers, she points out that they all struggle to maintain integrity, humanity, and effectiveness in a relentlessly fast-paced, technology-driven world. Credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to leadership based on living systems theory, or as she puts it - "how Life organizes" - Wheatley shares her first-ever compendium of essays about her real-world experiences helping clients introduce more authentic, life-affirming practices into their organizations. Essays cover a wide scope of topics including leadership strategies, raising children in turbulent times, and the role of communities in the life of organizations. Finding Our Way is filled with a wealth of practical advice on applying the ideas in Wheatley's groundbreaking books and has particular relevance for managers, administrators, and leaders who are trying to run their organizations in more progressive, egalitarian, and effective ways.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Margaret Wheatley is president of The Berkana Institute and an internationally acclaimed speaker and writer. She has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth. Her first work was as a public school teacher and urban education administrator in New York, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. She also has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts. For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on all continents. Her clients and audiences include large corporations, government agencies, healthcare institutions, foundations, public schools, colleges, major church denominations, the armed forces, professional associations, and monasteries. All of these organizations are wrestling with a common dilemma--how to maintain their integrity and effectiveness as they cope with relentless pressures for speed and change in chaotic environments. But there is also another similarity: A common human desire to live together more harmoniously, more humanely.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576753174
• ISBN-13: 978-1576753170
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. She works to create organizations of all types where people are known as the blessing, not the problem. She is president of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global foundation serving life-affirming leaders around the world, and has been an organizational consultant for many years, as well as a professor of management in two graduate programs. Her latest book, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future proposes that real social change comes from the ageless process of people thinking together in conversation. Wheatley's work also appears in two award-winning books, Leadership and the New Science and A Simpler Way (with Myron Kellner-Rogers), plus several videos and articles. She draws many of her ideas from new science and life's ability to organize in self-organizing, systemic, and cooperative modes. And, increasingly her models for new organizations are drawn from her understanding of many different cultures and spiritual traditions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic Humanist Counterpart to Her "Serious" Book, September 17, 2005

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Hardcover)

I am a little concerned by some of the negative commentary on this book being too "touchy feely." That is generally a sign that it has touched a nerve among "macho shit" types who think that elegance of thought and open affection for humanity is for gays and children. "Humanness" is for all of us, and if cannot cry, you cannot be human. Feelings must, as E. O. Wilson and others have documented so well, be fully factored into the whole of the human experience.

This is the poetic humanist counterpart book, a series of essays from the past from before the author was recognized as one of the most brilliant leadership gurus in the English-language. I certainly do recommend that her "serious" book, "Leadership and the New Science," be read first, and then this one.

The author has done a superb job of taking older essays and organizing them, putting them in context, to tell a new story. This book of essays is a new book for having been re-created in the aftermath of the success of "Leadership and the New Science," and I am choosing to give this book out to the audience of a gala leadership dinner in Washington, D.C., rather than the first book.

The author stresses that the old story of organization is the "machine" model, where people control and domination are the management paradigm, and resistance to change is seen as obstinance rather than coherent humanist understanding of the badness of the imposed conditions. The new story, by contrast, sees that everything is connected--as the author brilliantly puts it in her preface, "Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept."

She focuses on two fundamentals: the need for all mankind to be free to experiment, and in experimenting, create unlimited diversity; and the need to enhance and expand relationships with others as part of that diversity and sustainable mutually beneficial wealth creation.

Translating that into meaning for organizational leaders, she stresses self-organization, listening, embracing all inputs, and striving to create self-identity, information-sharing, and relationships that in turn generate discovery, sharing, and fulfillment.

This is not touchy-feely, this is common sense restored to the conversation of mankind.

The other important theme in this book is the paradox of community, which sets the stage for her rather bleak conclusions about America facing an abyss. She spends a lot of time examining how the web and nations are separating clusters of individuals, isolating groups, rather than nurturing a broadening of the communal ethos, what Paul Goodman understood so well in the 1980's as the need for "communitas" from neighborhood to globe.

The author is one hundred per cent on the money when she says, in a notional conversation with America's teen-agers, "We haven't taught you well about honor, sustainability, community, or compassion. We failed to show you how to be wise stewards of the earth, how to care for one another, how to resolve conflicts peacefully, how to enjoy others creativity as well as your own. Yet miraculously, you are learning these things."

She concludes by lamenting America's litigous society, where everyone knows their rights, but few know how to be in a community (or fulfil their civic duties to include loyalty to the Nation and engagement in the democratic process).

She tries to end the book on an uplifting note, speaking of the urgency of creating a web of hope, and of honoring those "few people who are not afraid to be insecure." She attributes most fear to the inherent tendency of organizations and nations to fight natural resistance to change with artificial fears of the unknown. Instead of fearing the unknown, she suggests, we should embrace the new and find new paths, new hopes, new solutions by using our collective intelligence and our new-found global community.

This is one of six books that I regard as a life-affirming, "must-read" collection for any person who aspires to contributing to a sustainable future for America, for any other nation, for any tribe, for any community, for any neighborhood. If we fail to listen to Margaret Wheatley and embrace her human values--as E. O. Wilson does in "Consilience" where he explains in detail why science must have the humanities--then we are destined to lose to the bacteria that are winning the inter-species war. We are our own worst enemy. This author, and her two books, are a very powerful intellectual, moral, and spritual antidote to all that ails us.

Five other books I recommend:
Robert Buckman, "Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization"
Clayton Christensen & Michael Raynor, "The Innovator's Solution"
Steve Denning's "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations"
Don Maruska, How Great Decisions Get Made"
Margaret Wheatley, "Leadership and the New Science"

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Continuing the Conversation, March 6, 2005

By 

Joyce Wycoff (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Hardcover)

Listening to Meg Wheatley is always worth while and her newest book is no exception. I find myself stoppng frequently to reflect on her words, poetry and photography, thinking about how they connect with my world and experiences. It takes a bit longer this way but the payoff is immense.

In a time of deep division and fear, Meg offers us a full measure of hope that nourishes the spirit and encourages me to put away my doubts, pick up my load and continue walking my chosen path. She is a voice of wisdom in a time that desperately needs wise encouragement. If you're already a fan, you'll enjoy this book ... if you haven't yet discovered Meg's gentle voice, I highly encourage you to dive in!

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Leadership is a fraud, May 29, 2005

By 

Aceto "All knowledge is sorrow." (Meilhan Sur Garonne) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Hardcover)

Uncertain people want leaders because they will not try. When we do not, we surrender to frauds who savage us. Dr. Wheatley is the voice of sweet reason. She has the Paul O'Neil school of open decisioning. She understands that leaders are janitors and facilitators, not thundering empty suits, including Carly Fiorina, the Shiva of HP. Trust the process, not the PR. One reviewer complains that she is touchy-feely and there is 'something missing'. I find her analytical and questioning. If you run planning as she describes, you get a practical way to first avoid disaster and then to manage risk, and finally to trust initiative. No slogans, no platitudes. As does Einstein, she makes things only so simple as they can truly be and not more. Uncertainty is the sane experience of complexity gone wild and informationally burdensome at the same time. Slow down, ignore pressure and trust inclusive process. Smart people cannot afford fatigue; tyrants love tired subjects. I shave off one star because she is a tad sexist. She blames the world gone wrong on male leaders and on women like Carly that adopt the male model. Yes, most of the players are male. Yes Carly and her ilk are savage. But she makes the howling error of not understanding that a good male conservative like O'Neil has been practicing what she writes as he saved his company and was driven from the cabinet. There is no male model, only the autocratic-plutocratic-cleptocratic model. But read this book as a way to drive your meetings and plans.