Margaret Wheatley - Leadership and the new science (1992)

11 Sourced Quotes

View all Margaret Wheatley Quotes
We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations — soft-spoken, even whispered at first — that we need to encourage.

Margaret Wheatley
The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs ofan impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity.

Margaret Wheatley
I believe the fundamental work of this time — work that requires the participation of all of us — is to discover new ways of 'being together.'

Margaret Wheatley
A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.

Margaret Wheatley
Leadership is always dependent upon the context, but the context is established by the relationships.

Margaret Wheatley
We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.

Margaret Wheatley
I was reading of chaos that contained order; of information as the primal, creative force; of systems that, by design, fell apart so they could renew themselves; and of invisible forces that structured space and held complex things together. These were compelling, evocative ideas, and they gave me hope, even if they did not reveal immediate solutions.

Margaret Wheatley
Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

Margaret Wheatley
We will need to become savvy about how to build relationships, how to nurture growing, evolving things. All of us will need better skills in listening, communicating, and facilitating groups, because these are the talents that build strong relationships.

Margaret Wheatley
We would do well to ponder the realization that love is the most potent source of power.

Margaret Wheatley
Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.

Margaret Wheatley