Perseverance
Perseverance is designed to offer guidance, challenge, clarity and consolation to all the people doing their work day-by-day. The topics are not the usual inspiring, feel good, rah-rah messages. Instead, Wheatley focuses on the situations, feelings, and challenges that can, over time, cause us to give up or lose our way. Perseverance is a discipline—it’s a day-by-day decision not to give up. Therefore, we have to notice the moments when we feel lost or overwhelmed or betrayed or exhausted and note how we respond to them. And we have to notice the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we’ve made a small difference.
Each topic is a brief essay, meant to be read as needed. (The book is not intended to be read through all at once.) You can thumb through the book and find what you need or what attracts you in the moment. Every essay names a behavior or dynamic, puts it into a broader human or timeless perspective, and offers ways for the reader to either live with or transcend that dynamic. The reader is also challenged by the direct voice of the book. Wheatley wants people to be able to see themselves, their situation, and to assume responsibility for changing the situation or their reaction to it if it’s one that troubles them. (There deliberately are no examples of other people—the reader is the example; their personal experience is the only case material.)
The content (essays and quotes) is drawn from many spiritual traditions and diverse cultures. The book is deeply grounded spiritually and also quite inclusive—accessing human experience and wisdom from many sources. Both this grounding and inclusiveness support the essential message—human being throughout time and history have persevered. We’re just the most recent ones to face these challenges.
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Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
This pioneering work shows how revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology provide powerful insights for transforming how we organize work, people and life. "Margaret Wheatley pushes our thinking about people and organizations to a new level".—Ken Blanchard.
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Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
Though management expert Margaret J. Wheatley works with a 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 lives of organizations. Finding Our Way is filled with practical advice on applying the ideas in Wheatley's groundbreaking books and has particular relevance for managers and leaders who are trying to run their organizations in more progressive, egalitarian, and effective ways.
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