- Hardcover: 200 pages
- Publisher: Berrett-Koehler; 2nd Revised edition edition (Oct 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1576750558
- ISBN-13: 978-1576750551
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 18.8 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 663,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Leadership and the New Science
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
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. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer", she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organisations worthy of human habitation." - -Howard Rothman, Amazon.com
Product Description
In the first edition of this text, Mary Wheatley showed how the "new science" provides powerful insights into the design, leadership and management of organizations. Now, in this revised and expanded edition, she sheds light on issues crucial to organizing work, people, and life. It is written in more accessible language and adds a new chapter to the book. In "Change - the Capacity of Life", Wheatley explains how the new physics offers an entirely new understanding of change, in which change is affected at the level of identity rather than by isolating and changing one defective part of ourselves or our organizations. In an expanded epilogue, Wheatley adds a chronicle of her experiences since the publication of the first edition and tells about the shift in her own understanding that occurred when she realized that "Leadership and the New Science" not only presents an alternative view of organizational dynamics but challenges people's most fundamental beliefs about the way the world works.
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First Sentence
It has taken us a long while to get here-a nine-mile hike up a gradual ascent over rocky paths. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
It has taken us a long while to get here-a nine-mile hike up a gradual ascent over rocky paths. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have just finished this amazing book! M. J Wheatley explores some very alien and difficult concepts about the nature of the universe with amazing clarity and perception.The world of new science has opened up to me, I have dipped into and reeled in chaos theory, quantam physics, fields, space and atoms. I have been helped to understand how this new knowledge can help me become a new kind of leader in a chaotic world. If you have been wondering why your management techniques don't work in an ever changing environment and you have instinctively felt a clanging with the environment you work in, then pick up this book and read! The ideas in this book will reassure you that anything is possible.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I was given this book by a colleague and friend and have enjoyed reading it immensely. The way she links science with how we operate as organisations is really interesting and her insights are valuable to anyone wishing to move away from old structures that don't work anymore. I am attending a course with her soon, can't wait!
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I enjoyed the book immensely and heartily recommend it to anyone wishing to challenge the way they see things, frustrated at the failure of current approaches to improvement or bemused by a world that fails to make any real sense.
The `new science' of the title are the advances in physics, biology, chemistry, quantum physics and elsewhere that reflect a change in understanding about how the world works.
Underpinning the book Margaret uses the contrast between the perspectives of this new science and that of traditional or Newtonian Science.
Her argument is that Newtonian Science served a purpose, but was always founded on compromise. A Newtonian view of the world is one appropriate to understanding the world through static snapshots and approximations. It creates a world that is separated and disconnected, a world based on prediction and knowing and on clearly defined roles of cause and effect.
Modern scientific thinking increasingly recognises the interconnected nature of the world, the reality that nothing exists in isolation, that cause and effect are illusions that exist only in a dissected world, and thus we live in a world in which we must foresake certainty and understand probabilities.
Margaret asserts that in attempting to give itself credence Business Management has adopted the artefacts of science, the techniques of measurement and of analysis. But this scientific approach is deeply rooted in a Newtonian view of the world, a view that is increasingly irrelevant as the world becomes ever more deeply interconnected.
If you are looking for some quick answers, tools and techniques, or wish to remain cosy in your current thinking, this is a book to avoid. If however you need room on your bookshelf, this might convince you to discard your current library of business books and perhaps your current thinking. An inspirational read.
The `new science' of the title are the advances in physics, biology, chemistry, quantum physics and elsewhere that reflect a change in understanding about how the world works.
Underpinning the book Margaret uses the contrast between the perspectives of this new science and that of traditional or Newtonian Science.
Her argument is that Newtonian Science served a purpose, but was always founded on compromise. A Newtonian view of the world is one appropriate to understanding the world through static snapshots and approximations. It creates a world that is separated and disconnected, a world based on prediction and knowing and on clearly defined roles of cause and effect.
Modern scientific thinking increasingly recognises the interconnected nature of the world, the reality that nothing exists in isolation, that cause and effect are illusions that exist only in a dissected world, and thus we live in a world in which we must foresake certainty and understand probabilities.
Margaret asserts that in attempting to give itself credence Business Management has adopted the artefacts of science, the techniques of measurement and of analysis. But this scientific approach is deeply rooted in a Newtonian view of the world, a view that is increasingly irrelevant as the world becomes ever more deeply interconnected.
If you are looking for some quick answers, tools and techniques, or wish to remain cosy in your current thinking, this is a book to avoid. If however you need room on your bookshelf, this might convince you to discard your current library of business books and perhaps your current thinking. An inspirational read.
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