Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe [Paperback]

Margaret J. Wheatley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994

Based on new science theories, this innovative management book sheds light on the issues that affect organizations most--order and change, autonomy and control, structure and flexibility, planning and innovation. The hardcover was considered the number-one management book of 1992.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

How do you hold 100 tons of water in the air with no visible means of support? Wheatley answers this question (you build a cloud, of course) and many others, ranging from cutting-edge science to the new paradigm of 21st-century organizations, that are just as enigmatic. Using exciting breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, and especially quantum physics, Wheatley paints a brand-new picture of business management. Paradoxes abound in this far-reaching work that may confound many pragmatists. This new relationship between business and science is nothing less than an entirely new set of lenses through which to view our organizations, offering not a Newtonian but a quantum perspective. Hold onto the top of your head when you read this book. For larger public and academic libraries.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

"The best, most lucid thinking of any of the 'leadership' books to come out in the past few years." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 166 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881052443
• ISBN-13: 978-1881052449
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,680 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wheatley provokes the mind to rethink organizations, June 17, 2003

By 

"rajnaik" (New Berlin, WI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Paperback)

Margaret Wheatley explores the reasons for the apparent failure of numerous contemporary managers to understand the nature of organizations. By drawing interesting parallels with new science, she challenges the traditional assumptions of organizations and leaves the reader with alternatives.
She urges redesigning organizations where relationships are valued, processes are allowed to flourish at varying speeds, with appropriate structures being formed to support these processes that ultimately help achieve organizational goals. Information flow is fundamental in this process.
She explains that a viable, open system in a state of non-equilibrium, constantly changing and morphing is preferable over a stable, balanced system in equilibrium or stasis. It implores organizations to change form constantly to meet the changing needs of the environment, arguing that organizations develop greater freedom from the environment through this very change process.
Wheatley has made a great attempt to validate and provide legitimacy to new management principles by providing connections to important scientific discoveries of the last century. A "must read" book for new age leaders.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Tipping Point" Book, Vital for Achieving Sustainable Peace and Prosperity, September 17, 2005

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Hardcover)

This book is beyond five stars, and not just for business, where it is receiving all the praise it is due, but within government, where it has not yet been noticed. It was recommended to me by the author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and I now recommend it to everyone I know. If there are two books that can "change the world," these are the ones.

Although the Chinese understood all this stuff centuries ago (Yin/Yang, space between the dots, the human web), the author is correct when she notes late in the book that the commoditization of the human worker (Cf. Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System) and the emphasis on scientific objectivity and scientific manager (Cf. Jean Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) were perhaps the greatest error we might have made in terms of long-run progress. Coincidentally, as I finished the book, on the Discovery channel in the background they were discussing how the leveeing of the Mississippi blocked the Louisiana watershed from cleansing the Mississippi naturally, as it once used to.

It's all about systems--the author does cite Donella Meadows' 1982 article in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly, but does not pay much heed to the large body of literature that thrived in the 1970's around the Club of Rome.

There are perhaps three bottom lines in this book that I would recommend to any government leader who hopes to stabilize and reconstruct our world:

1) Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. Blocking or controlling information flows stunts our growth and virtually assures defeat if not death. It is the optimization of listening--being open to *all* information (and especially all the information the secret world now ignores)--that optimizes our ability to adjust, evolve, and grow.

2) Command & control is history, block and wire diagrams are history. General Al Gray had it right in the 1990's when he talked about "commander's intent" as the baseline. Leaders today need to be disruptive, to look for dissonant views and news, and to empower all individuals at all levels with both information, and the authority to act on that information.

3) Disorder is an *opportunity*. We have the power to define ourselves, our "opponents," and our circumstances in ways that can either inspire protective, constricted, secretive, "armed" responses, or inclusive, open, sharing "pro-active" peaceful responses.

EDIT of 12 Dec 07: Haver ordered and will be reviewing several books that highlight the importance of diversity as a foundation for innovation.

The author is to be praised for noting early on in the book that "Ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in the relationship any organization has with colleagues, stakeholders, and communities." I would extend that to note that social ethics and foreign policy ethics are the foundation for sustainable life on the planet, and we appear to be a long way from understanding that it is ethics, not guns, that will stabilize and fertilize...Cf Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

It also merits comment that the author essentially kills the industry of forecasting, scenarios, modeling, and futures simulations. I agree with her view (and that of others) that early warning is achieved, not through the theft of secret plans and intentions or the forecasting of behavior, but rather by casting a very wide net, listening carefully to all that is openly available, sharing it very widely (as the LINUX guys say, put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug will be invisible), and then being open to changed relationships. Trying to maintain the status quo will simply not do.

I give the author credit for carrying out an extraordinary survey of the literature on quantum mechanics, and for developing a PhD-level explanation of why old organization theory, based on the linear concepts of Newtonian physics, is bad for us, and how the new emergent organization theory, understood by too few, is let about the things and more about the relationships between and among the things.

This is an elegant essay and a heroic personal work of discovery, interpretation, and integration. While I would have liked to see more credit given to Kuhn, Drucker, Garfield, Brand, Rheingold, and numerous others that I have reviewed here for Amazon, on balance, given the academic narrowness of her Harvard PhD, I think the author has performed at the Olympic level. This is a radical book, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Hampden-Turner's book, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. which as I recall was not accepted by Harvard as a thesis at the time. Perhaps Harvard is evolving (smile).

For other key books that complement and precede this book, see my lists on information society, collective intelligence, business intelligence, and intelligence qua spies and secrecy in an open world.

Read this book BEFORE you read her new collection of essays, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time

EDIT of 12 Dec 07: I must say, I am both astonished and disappointed that more of us have not found and absorbed this great work. Margaret Wheatley, whom I have not met (but I have met Tom Atlee, Juanita Brown, and Robert Buckman) strikes me as the "Mother" of a new form of continuous global education and innovation. Not sure what the answer is, but we have to pay more attention to this person's reflections.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars World class philosophy but light on specifics, September 4, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Grays Harbor County, WA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Hardcover)

Wheatley does a fine job of explaining the implications for organizations and management philosophy of the shift away from the mechanistic worldview that grew out of Newtonian physics. She does a good job of explaining how quantum physics and chaos theory together demolished all the asusmptions of the mechanistic worldview. This mechanistic view fostered the idea that organizations are impersonal machines. It also gave credence to the nonsensical idea of the commodity theory of labor applied to the people hired to fill the "job-parts" of those machines. The mechanistic view excludes concepts such as esprit de corps or team spirit. It ignores the communal loyalty that goes with teamspirit that helps foster cooperative self-motivated teamwork so vital in achieving top performance.

The new (postmodern) worldview is organic rather than mechanistic, is holistic rather than parts centered, is participatory rather than impersonal and manages much more via networks than through top down hierarchies. As Capra points out in his book, The Web of Life, all living systems are mainly coordinated by networks, not hierarchies. All this fits well with the new postmodern management philosophy that stress empowerment of employees on the local level, self managed teams, and organic systems. And as Wheatley points out the reality of such new thinking lies in the relationships that arise from them

If Wheatley is great on philosophy and of the importance of relationships, she is more than a bit light on the specific policies that in fact create a mechanistic or an organic set of social relationships within an organization. These policies are not at all mysterious. If you want to create a mechanistic (read bureaucratic) organization then as a matter of policy establish an employment relationship between the firm and employee based on the buyer-seller relationship. You will then hire people to do designated jobs complete with detailed job descriptions. And thus though autopoiesis (that Wheatley well describes but does not much apply)you almost will guarantee that your employees will become job defensive, especially in times of change which will be seen as threats to one's (job-based)identity because autopoiesis drives all life at all levels to remain self consistent including the integrity and consistency of one's identity. The employee is thus driven to job-defensiveness. The bureaucratic employee will also sub-optimize behavior around the job-part, rather than the whole organization. To be promoted, one must be promoted in job, motivating most bureaucrats to lobby constantly for more levels of management in the administrative hierarchy to create more rungs on the administrative promotion ladder. Then too turf battles between departments full of jobs routinely break out for lack of a holistic focus on the enterprise. (The word bureaucracy is the same as saying departmentocracy and is itself an indication of a fragmented focus.) But it is important to realize, as Wheatley does not seem to, that all such pathology is policy-driven more than attitude-driven. After all, the attitude of suboptimization itself arises from the policy to depend on hired labor paid to do particular jobs in a buyer-seller relationship. It is this parts-focused relationship that creates bureaucratic reality. It does so the world around quite apart from cultural differences.

You want out of this bureaucratic box? Then go organic and pay the person, not the job. Make the employee a "member of the firm" as if the firm were a sort of extended family. Let the income of all such members rise or fall together in sync with the firm's performance. The the employee is no longer an impersonal hireling, but an organic member of the whole. As such he or she is free to focus on the whole firm. Indeed they have every motivation to do so. Thus organic members tend spontaneously to develop a team spirit. They are free to participate as a team member cooperating for the better good of the whole, because, to do so is not threatening as it often is to the hired job-holder. William M. Wallace's book (Postmodern Management) which is also available on Amazon.com makes all this clear.

Still in the end Wheatley is worth reading and I for one read it several times. Thus I anxiously await her updated version which apparently will appear next month.