Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised (Paperback)

by Margaret J. Wheatley (Author) "It has taken us a long while to get here-a nine-mile hike up a gradual ascent over rocky paths..." (more)
Key Phrases: machine imagery, quantum world, reaction channels, Chaos Game

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
When Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science was initially published in 1992, it outlined an unquestionably unique but extremely challenging view of change, leadership, and the structure of groups. Many readers immediately embraced its cutting-edge perspective, but others just could not understand how the complicated scientific tenets it described could be used to reshape institutions. Now Wheatley, an organizational specialist who has since coauthored A Simpler Way, updates the original by including additional material (such as an epilogue addressing her personal experiences during the past decade) and reconstructing some of her more challenging concepts. The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice, then investigates ways that biology and chemistry affect living systems, and finally focuses on chaos theory, the creation of a new order, and the manner that scientific principles affect leadership. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer," she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organizations worthy of human habitation." --Howard Rothman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"A book like Leadership and the New Science only comes along once in a decade. Margaret Wheatley pushes our thinking about people and organizations to a new dimension. You will never think about organizational life in the same way again."-Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans, and Empowerment Takes More than a Minute

"If there's a single book that sets the stage for the future of organizations, this is it.... Wheatley makes complex ideas simple, and then shows how those simple ideas can be used as powerful tools." -Stephen E. Ewing, President and CEO, Michigan Consolidated Gas Company

"An extraordinary book. The new physics is opening frontiers of knowledge that are among the most significant of this century. Applying these discoveries to management and leadership is extraordinarily eye-opening." -Marjorie Kelly, Founder and Publisher, Business Ethics magazine -- Marjorie Kelly, Founder and Publisher Business Ethics magazine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 2 Reprint edition (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576751198
• ISBN-13: 978-1576751190
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #163,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Tipping Point" Book Vital to Government, Not Just Business, January 22, 2005

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

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.

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.

A handful of other amazing books (am limited to ten total):
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shocking and motivating, December 20, 2002

By	Maxim Masiutin (Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In this brilliant book, Margaret J. Weathley brings parallels between the theory of leadership and the quantum physics. Being an organizational consultant, not the physical by herself, she
encourages "to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what has become known to us during the twentieth century".

She exposes the bright conclusions from her experience of working as a consultant, and these conclusions are confirmed by quantum physics as well:

- The things we fear most in organizations - disruptions, confusion, chaos - need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity.

- What is critical is the relationship created between two or more elements. Systems influence individuals, and individuals call form systems.

- There is no objective reality; the environment we experience does not exist "out there". It is co-created through our acts of observation, what we choose to notice and worry about.

- Acting should precede planning.

- Instead of the ability to analyze and predict, we need to know how to stay acutely aware of what's happening now, and we need to be better, faster learners from what just happened.

- We need fewer descriptions of tasks and instead learn how to facilitate process.

- Power becomes a problem, not a capacity. People use their creativity to work against these leaders, or in spite of them; they refuse to contribute positively to the organization.

- Those who have used music metaphors to describe working together, especially jazz metaphors, are sensing to the nature of this quantum world. This world demands that we be present together, and be willing to improvise.

- If a manager is told that a new trainee is particularly gifted, that manager will see genius emerging from the trainee's mouth even in obscure statements. But if the manager is told that his or her new hire is a bit slow on the uptake, the manager will interpret a brilliant idea as a sure sign of sloppy thinking of obfuscation.

- In quantum world, what you see is what you get.

- Every time we go to measure something, we interfere.

- A place where the act of looking for certain information evokes the information we went looking for - and simultaneously eliminates our opportunity to observe other information.

- Every observation is preceded by a choice about what to observer.

- We all construct the world though lenses of our own making and use these to filter and select.

- It simply doesn't work to ask people to sign on when they haven't been involved in the planning process.

- Roles mean nothing without understanding the network of relationships and the resources that are required to support the work of that person. In this relational world, it is foolish to think we can define any person solely in terms of isolated tasks and accountabilities.

- What is distinguishable and important, he says, are the kinds of connections.

- Our old views constrain us. They deprive us from engaging fully with this universe of potentials.

Based on the parallels above mentioned, Margaret J. Weathley brings lot of compelling ideas about the leadership and organizational management. This book isn't a collection of dos and don'ts, but invigorates deep creative thinking.

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting conclusions, lack of good argument, November 18, 2003

By	George M. Nickles III (Cullowhee, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In this book, the author describes current theories in science and applies them to human organizational management. She develops a number of concepts that I think are applicable to organizational management, such as flexibility, greater communication within an organization, the importance of information, and valuing the intelligence of individual workers.

However, the reasons for applying these principles developed from science to organizations are not well established in this book, in my opinion. The applications may be valid, but a strong case for them is not made here. For example, one claim made to justify one conclusion is that "organizations are open systems and are responsive to the same self-organizing dynamics as all other life." (p. 97). This is a bold claim, to link life sciences to management, that is not well substantiated in the book.

The author seems to revel in the ancient (and ongoing) philosophical tension between the parts and the whole, calling us to look at the whole of a system, though rejecting objective reality (an ultimate whole), and with a bit of Gnostic thinking as well: "Matter doesn't matter" (p. 153),

Also, this is not an informative work, rather its intention appears to be persuasive. The author does reference many works in the scientific literature, but it is not intended to be a review or strict proof (I hope) of her position. Some aspects of science that seem to me to contradict some of her conclusions are not discussed, such as the order imposed top-down in the theory of relativity (according to my limited understanding of it), and the fact that some changes must be wholly destructive and cannot have positive effects (e.g., certain genetic mutations).

Again, some good points are made, but their basis is not well established here. As an industrial engineer, I do not think we should throw away all the current practices, and hopefully that attitude is not simply self-serving. I cannot recommend this particular book, but hope there is a more substantial treatment of these concepts elsewhere.