Margaret Wheatley

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.

Dr. Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. She works to create organizations of all types worthy of human habitation, where people are seen as the blessing, not the problem. She is president of The Berkana Institute, a global leadership foundation, and was an organizational consultant for many years, as well as a professor of management in two graduate programs. Her work appears in three award-winning books, Leadership and the New Science (1992, 1999), A Simpler Way (co-authored with Myron Kellner-Rogers, 1996) and Turning to One Another (2002), plus several videos and articles. Her latest book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, (March 2005) is a revised and updated collection of her practice-focused articles, where she applies themes that she has addressed throughout her career to detail the organizational practices and behaviors that bring them to life. She draws many of her ideas from new science and life's ability to organize in self-organizing, systemic, and cooperative modes. However, increasingly her models for new organizations are drawn from her understanding of many different cultures and spiritual traditions.

For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on six different continents. Her clients and audiences range from the head of the U.S. Army to twelve year old Girl Scouts, from CEOs to small town ministers. This diversity includes 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.

The Berkana Institute is a charitable scientific, educational, and research foundation founded in 1991. Berkana experiments with the new ideas, processes, and structures that represent the future of organizing. It has actively explored, through dialogues, seminars, and consulting, how organizations can develop and sustain their capacity, clarity and resiliency in these turbulent times. In 2000, Berkana initiated From the Four Directions: People Everywhere Leading the Way. This is a global leadership initiative that organizes on-going circles of leaders in local communities across the world, and then connects these local circles into a global community of life-affirming leaders.

Margaret's path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science was first published in 1992. This book is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations. It has been translated into twelve languages and won many awards, including "Best Management book of 1992" in Industry Week, Top Ten Business Books of the 1990s in CIO Magazine, and Top Ten Business Books of all time by Xerox Corporation. A new edition was published in 1999, significantly revised, updated and expanded. The video of Leadership and the New Science, produced by CRM films, has also won several film awards.

A Simpler Way, co-authored with Myron Kellner-Rogers in 1996 explores the question: Could we organize human endeavor differently if we understood how Life organizes? Through photos, poetry, and prose, the book explains self-organization, and the conditions that nurture it in life and organizations.

Wheatley's newest book Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future was published in January 2002. Wheatley also writes frequently for professional journals and magazines.

Dr. Wheatley received her doctorate from Harvard University's program in Administration, Planning and Social Policy. She holds an M.A. in Communications and Systems Thinking from New York University, and has also been a research associate at Yale University. She has been a fellow of the World Business Academy, and The Kings Fund, England, and an advisor to The Fetzer Institute's Fellows Program.