Though management expert Margaret Wheatley works with an unusually 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 life of organizations. Finding Our Way is filled with a wealth of practical advice on applying the ideas in Wheatley’s groundbreaking books and has particular relevance for managers, administrators, and leaders who are trying to run their organizations in more progressive, egalitarian, and effective ways.
Customer Reviews
Reaching toward holism:
Margaret Wheatley offers reflective essays that are both intellectual and heartfully personal. She reminds us that organizations are full of people struggling to be whole, and hence the best way to create healthy, well-functioning organizations (be they companies, schools, or community groups) is to adopt a holistic approach. (Holistic is actually my word, not Wheatley’s, but the text speaks in that way to me). Holism in this context is about inclusion, respect, accepting the messiness of relationships, and always thinking in a larger context rather than getting burdened with trivialities. Life actually knows how to solve problems just fine — it is usually our own attempts at controlling and planning that interfere with the natural process. Wheatley’s essays offer relief to the anxious minds of leaders who think they have to know everything, be fully in charge, and “create” the future.
Visionary:
Margaret J Wheatley beautifully weaves the compassion of a wise woman with the insight of a true visionary to deliver a very moving message. The new paradigm of leadership Ms. Wheatley describes embraces all citizens, creates harmony, and compels each member to become their best authentic self. Regardless of your structure: business, family, corporate, or government, your environment will benefit from this philosophy, individually and collectively. I found a shift in my perspective and the tools to take it to the streets. Ms. Wheatleys elegant writing inspires us to be better and do better.
refreshing honesty:
Some reviewers have called for a “management book” — that’s the last thing we need. What I love about Wheatley is that she goes where no one else goes, and creates a path. For that reason, I use this book with my senior seminar leadership students in an effort to send them out into the world to do the same.
Disappointing:
I was all set to fall in love with Finding Our Way: Leadership in Uncertain Times by Margaret Wheatley. A friend had recommended Wheatley, and I have spent the last several years researching the interplay between systems thinking, connectionism, quality, leadership and learning. I’ve been reading Deming, Keynes, Bateson, Prigogine and Karl Polanyi. I had just come out of a three week period of intensive training, leading and facilitating a group of software users in gathering user requirements and system modeling. The book was brand new and available at the library.
Finding Our Way is, unfortunately, a compendium of nebulous generalities. In trying to make the case for self-organizing systems as models for human organization, the “new story” falls short. I can’t help but note that mobs, riots and panics are self-organizing.
The ideas may be relevant and Wheatley’s descriptions of current conditions seem accurate, but the presentation and writing style make for a rather mushy, second-rate management book. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the fabulous work of the writers cited above. I fear the author misses the irony of Thera, her model “nature-based” civilization, being destroyed by a volcano.
I had been hoping for a more specific, detailed, and perhaps case-based book on how to actually lead in the midst of chaos. Perhaps, as other reviewers have indicated, her other books are more serious, and I will certainly take a stab at Leadership and the New Science. Finding Our Way does have this to recommend it: it’s so fluffy, one can probably get through it at one sitting.
Good!:
This book is very impressive because of the writer’s attitude towords the world. Good for everybody who read this book!
