Margaret J. Wheatley (commonly Meg Wheatley) is a writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize. Her work is often compared to that of Donella Meadows and Dee Hock. She describes her work as opposing "highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors."
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Meg grew up on the East Coast, in New York City area and then Boston. In 1989 she moved her family to the mountains of Utah, where she has been happily living ever since. She has raised a large family of two sons and five step-children who have now produced 17 grandchildren (still counting). She travels the world willingly and often, to return to the peace of wilderness in Sundance, Utah where she relishes her family, mountains, horses and life. During the 1960's, Wheatley served in the Peace Corps in Korea for two years while teaching high school English. She received her doctorate from Harvard University and holds an M.A. in systems thinking from New York University. She has worked on every inhabited continent in "virtually every type of organization" and considers herself a global citizen. Her practice as an organizational consultant and researcher began in 1973. Since then she served as a professor of management in two graduate programs. She has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts. Wheatley has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) has named her one of five living legends. In May 2003, ASTD awarded her their highest honor: “Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance.”
She is presently president of The Berkana Institute, a global charitable leadership foundation.
She has served in a formal advisory capacity for leadership programs in England, Croatia, Denmark, Australia and the United States, and through her work in Berkana, with leadership initiatives in India, Senegal, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil as well as Europe.
Her books include:
"There is a simpler, finer way to organize human endeavor. I have declared this for many years and seen it to be true in many places. This simpler way is demonstrated to us in daily life, not the life we see on the news with its unending stories of human grief and horror, but what we feel when we experience a sense of life’s deep harmony, beauty, and power, of how we feel when we see people helping each other, when we feel creative, when we know we’re making a difference, when life feels purposeful."
"Over many years of work all over the world, I've learned that if we organize in the same way that the rest of life does, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life’s processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings."
"Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (now the methods most used in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Leaders use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already feeble controls, rather than engaging people's best capacities to learn and adapt. In doing so, they only create more chaos. Leaders incite primitive emotions of fear, scarcity, and self-interest to get people to do their work, rather than the more noble human traits of cooperation, caring, and generosity. This has led to this difficult time, when nothing seems to work as we want it to, when too many of us feel frustrated, disengaged, and anxious."
"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about."
"To resolve most dysfunctional situations, the first thing to do is flood them with information."