Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe

Margaret Wheatley shows how the "New Science"-the revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology that are overturning centuries-old models of science-provides powerful insights for transforming how we design, lead, and manage organizations.

Our understanding of the universe is being radically altered by the "New Science"-the revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and evolutionary biology that are overturning the models of science that have dominated for centuries. Now, in this pioneering book, Margaret Wheatley shows how the new science provides equally powerful insights for changing the ways we design, lead, manage, and view organizations.

In a warm, inviting style, Margaret Wheatley takes readers on a mind-opening journey into the new science, and applies these concepts to shed new light on the fundamental issues of organizing work, people, and life.

How do you hold 100 tons of water in the air with no visible means of support? Wheatley answers this question (you build a cloud, of course) and many others, ranging from cutting-edge science to the new paradigm of 21st-century organizations, that are just as enigmatic. Using exciting breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, and especially quantum physics, Wheatley paints a brand-new picture of business management. Paradoxes abound in this far-reaching work that may confound many pragmatists. This new relationship between business and science is nothing less than an entirely new set of lenses through which to view our organizations, offering not a Newtonian but a quantum perspective. Hold onto the top of your head when you read this book. For larger public and academic libraries.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"The best, most lucid thinking of any of the 'leadership' books to come out in the past few years."