Margaret Wheatley TOPICS: Business Leadership Team Building Change FEE CATEGORY:* Contact for fee schedule TRAVELS FROM: Utah Video Profile Books & Videos Request This Speaker

Margaret Wheatley: Profile

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.

For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on all 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 the relentless upheavals and rapid shifts of these chaotic times. But there is also another similarity: A common human desire to live together more harmoniously, more humanely.

The Berkana Institute is a global charitable leadership foundation begun in 1991, dedicated to serving life-affirming leaders. Berkana has always experimented with the new ideas, processes, and structures that represent the future of organizing, and has worked with people in more than 40 countries. Using multiple means, Berkana supports local leaders who are working to create communities and organizations where the human spirit is known as the blessing, not the problem. Berkana has discovered that the world is blessed with tens of thousands of these leaders—they are young and old, in all countries, working in education, NGOs, community development, governments, businesses. They are courageous people discovering successful ways to create positive change in their local communities, villages, and organizations. Berkana supports them by providing resources, ideas, and methods for use in their local communities.

Berkana also connects these leaders to one another, creating a global community of life-affirming leaders. Margaret’s path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science was first published in 1992, and has been translated into 17 languages. This book is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations. It is a standard text in many leadership programs, and has won notable 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 Rogers, (1996 ) explores the question: How would 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. Bill Moyers recently commented: “A Simpler Way" is a wonderful experience to read. I have it at my bedside table in the apartment and am spending part of each day with it.

Her recent book, Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2002), proposes that it is the simple, familiar act of conversation that offers the most hope for changing the world. This book is being widely used by communities, schools, religious organizations, and social change efforts.

Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, her newest book, will be released in March 2005.

She 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 serves as advisor to the Danish government’s Learning Labs and to the Australian Centre for Educational Leadership. Over the years she has been a fellow of the World Business Academy and The Kings Fund, England. She has been advisor to both the Croatian Management Academy and to The Fetzer Institute. She has received several awards and honorary doctorates. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) has honored her with the title “a living legend.”

In May 2003, she received the highest award given by ASTD, the “Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance.” The citation for this award included this description: “Meg Wheatley gave the world a new way of thinking about organizations with her revolutionary application of the natural sciences to business management. Her concepts have traveled across national boundaries and through all sectors. Her ideas have found welcome homes in the military, not-for-profit organizations, public schools, and churches as well as in corporations. Through the Berkana Institute, a charitable foundation which she started in Provo, Utah, Wheatley is supporting the development of local leaders in over 40 countries to foster societies that tap and evoke the best of human capability.

Through her interdisciplinary curiosity, Meg Wheatley provides new insights into the nature of how people interact and inspires us to build better organizations and better societies across the globe.”

Topics Include:
• Developing Leadership Capacity in Chaotic Condtions
• Are We Learning form Experience: Reclaiming Time to Think
• The Essential needs of Organizations Today: Trust, Responsibility, and Direction
• Thinking Well About Complex Problems
  

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