Leadership and the New Science

by WHEATLEY, MARGARET J.

• ISBN13: 9781576751190
• ISBN10: 1576751198
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-01-08
• Publisher: BERRETT-KOEHLER PUBLISHERS

Summary

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 organisational specialist who has since Co-authored 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 organisational 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

Author Biography

Margaret J. Wheatley is president of the Berkana Institute, a non-profit educational and scientific research foundation supporting the discovery of new organizational forms. She is also a principal in Kellner-Rogers and Wheatley Inc, an international education and consulting firm applying principles of living systems to human organizations.

Table of Contents

About This New Edition	ix
Preface	xiii
Acknowledgments	xix
Introduction: Searching for a Simpler Way to Lead Organizations	3	(14)
Discovering an Orderly World	17	(10)
Newtonian Organizations in a Quantum Age	27	(22)
Space Is Not Empty: Invisible Fields That Shape Behavior	49	(12)
The Participative Nature of the Universe	61	(14)
Change, Stability, and Renewal: The Paradoxes of Self-Organizing Systems	75	(18)
The Creative Energy of the Universe---Information	93	(22)
Chaos and the Strange Attractor of Meaning	115	(22)
Change---The Capacity of Life	137	(20)
The New Scientific Management	157	(14)
Epilogue: Journeying to a New World	171	(5)
Further Development of These Ideas and Practices	176	(2)
Bibliography	178	(7)
Index	185	(10)
About the Author	195