MARGARET WHEATLEY

Internationally Acclaimed Author, Speaker & Authority on Leadership

Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about how we might organize and accomplish our work in chaotic times. She invites us to attend to the quality of our relationships to weather the increasing turbulence. She knows that whatever the problem, community is the answer. Meg has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth. Her first work was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea and a public school teacher and urban education administrator in New York. She has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts.

Since 1973, Meg has worked with an unusually broad variety of organizations on all continents. Her clients and audiences are broad in range and are wrestling with a common dilemma—how to maintain their integrity and effectiveness as they cope with the relentless upheavals and rapid shifts in these chaotic times. But there is also another similarity: A common human desire to live together more harmoniously, more humanely.

She co-founded The Berkana Institute in 1992, a charitable global foundation that works in partnership with a rich diversity of people around the world who strengthen their communities by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in their people, traditions and environment. The Institute has worked in dozens of countries, most of them in the Third World, and has discovered that the world is blessed with tens of thousands of courageous, life-affirming leaders.

Meg’s path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science was first published in 1992, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. This book is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations. It is a standard text in many leadership programs, and has won notable awards, including “Best Management book of 1992” in Industry Week, Top Ten Business Books of the 1990s in CIO Magazine, and Top Ten Business Books of all time by Xerox Corporation. Wheatley has also authored, A Simpler Way, (co-authored with Myron Rogers), Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future and Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time.

Meg received her doctorate from Harvard University’s program in Administration, Planning and Social Policy. She holds an M.A. in Communications and Systems Thinking from New York University, and a B.A. in History from the University of Rochester. In 2003, The American Society for Training and Development honored her for “distinguished contribution to workplace learning and development” and dubbed her “a living legend”. In April 2005, she was elected to the Leonardo Da Vinci Society for her contribution to the development of the field of systems thinking.

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 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.

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