Leadership and the New Science

Leadership and the New Science:  Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe
by Margaret J. Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 1999, revised. 

This is a must read book for anyone interested in leadership and the topic shouldn't intimidated anyone.  Wheatley, who has just revised her 1992 edition, does an amazing job of taking very complex concepts for the non scientist and making it completely assessable.  Relatively speaking it is an easy-to read summary.   You will have to concentrate but it can be finished in a relatively short time frame. This is a book that I am glad to own and review periodically.  There is a great list of suggested readings and an extensive bibliography.  It was one of the top 20 books recommended in the survey that we conducted last fall. 

In the late eighties, I make the effort to read James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science.  It took me forever and I thought the only thing that I remembered were the words:  fractal, wave and particle.  Wheatley reminded me of how much I had retained and more importantly gave me a context for this knowledge.  It helps to look at the "big picture" with renewed hope and optimism.   This is not a book of answers but of journeys.  It is about ideas and concepts.  It is about relationships and patterns between things.  Don't expect any practical suggestions or How to do's.

When it comes to these kinds of topics, many individuals wait in the wings to make criticisms and disparaging remarks.  As far as I can tell, Wheatley is highly respected in the scientific community and business sector.  So she should be.  This and her follow-up book A Simpler Way, are sure to become classics in the management literature.

RFH (00/01)

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