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Margaret Wheatley

In May 2003, Margaret Wheatley received the highest award given by ASTD, the Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance. The citation for this award included this description:

"Meg Wheatley gave the world a new way of thinking about organizations with her revolutionary application of the natural sciences to business management. Her concepts have traveled across national boundaries and through all sectors. Her ideas have found welcome homes in the military, not-for-profit organizations, public schools, and churches as well as in corporations.

"Through the Berkana Institute, a charitable foundation which she started in Provo, Utah, Wheatley is supporting the development of local leaders in over 40 countries to foster societies that tap and evoke the best of human capability.

"Through her interdisciplinary curiosity, Meg Wheatley provides new insights into the nature of how people interact and inspires us to build better organizations and better societies across the globe."

Education: University of Rochester and University College London; Master of Arts degree from New York University in systems thinking; Doctorate from Harvard’s program in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy, with a focus on organizational behavior and change.

Early career: two years in the Peace Corps in Korea, teaching high school English. On returning to the U.S., taught junior and senior high school, then became an educational administrator of programs for children and adults who were economically poor and denied traditional educational opportunities.

Consultant and speaker: with almost all types of organizations and people, including head of the U.S. Army to twelve year old Girl Scouts, from CEOs to small town ministers; Fortune 100 corporations, government agencies, healthcare institutions, foundations, public schools, colleges, major church denominations, professional associations, and monasteries; on all continents.

"Every organization is wrestling with a similar dilemma—how to maintain its integrity, direction, and effectiveness as it copes with relentless turbulence and change. But there is another similarity I’m hopeful to report: A common human desire for peace, to live together more harmoniously, more humanely."

Faculty: Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and The Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Co-founder and President Emerita: The Berkana Institute, a global charitable foundation founded in 1991, and dedicated to serving life-affirming leaders. For information about Berkana’s work, see www.berkana.org.

Books and publications: Leadership and the New Science, credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations.

A Simpler Way (1996) co-authored with Myron Kellner-Rogers.

Turning to One Another: Simple conversations to restore hope to the future (2002)

Finding Our Way: Leadership for an uncertain time (2005)

Articles appear in a wide range of professional publications and magazines, and can be downloaded at margaretwheatley.com

Page updated Wed, March 25, 2009