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Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World [ILLUSTRATED] (平装)
by Margaret J Wheatley
| Category:
Leadership, Management, Organizational behavior |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
MSL price:
¥ 178.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
MSL Pointer Review:
Based on the parallels above mentioned, the author brings lot of compelling ideas about the leadership and organizational management. This book isn't a collection of dos and don'ts, but invigorates deep creative thinking.
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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Amazon.com (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
When Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science was initially published in 1992, it outlined an unquestionably unique but extremely challenging view of change, leadership, and the structure of groups. Many readers immediately embraced its cutting-edge perspective, but others just could not understand how the complicated scientific tenets it described could be used to reshape institutions. Now Wheatley, an organizational specialist who has since coauthored A Simpler Way, updates the original by including additional material (such as an epilogue addressing her personal experiences during the past decade) and reconstructing some of her more challenging concepts. The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice, then investigates ways that biology and chemistry affect living systems, and finally focuses on chaos theory, the creation of a new order, and the manner that scientific principles affect leadership. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer," she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organizations worthy of human habitation." -Howard Rothman |
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AudioFile (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
In this revised edition of her 1992 book, Wheatley provides an overview of some dramatic changes in scientific thought, such as chaos theory and quantum physics, and then applies those theories to organizations. What kind of organizations? Organizations of all sizes and shapes and business. Wheatley reads her work competently, in a controlled, even voice. Her straightforward presentation offers few distractions and is easy listening. She integrates the theoretical with a range of practical examples from many of the organizations she has worked with. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine |
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Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans, USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
A book like Leadership and the New Science only comes along once in a decade. Margaret Wheatley pushes our thinking about people and organizations to a new dimension. You will never think about organizational life in the same way again. |
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Stephen E. Ewing, President and CEO, Michigan Consolidated Gas Company , USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
If there's a single book that sets the stage for the future of organizations, this is it.... Wheatley makes complex ideas simple, and then shows how those simple ideas can be used as powerful tools. |
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Marjorie Kelly, Founder and Publisher, Business Ethics magazine , USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
An extraordinary book. The new physics is opening frontiers of knowledge that are among the most significant of this century. Applying these discoveries to management and leadership is extraordinarily eye-opening. |
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From the Publisher, USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
IN HER PIONEERING BESTSELLER Leadership and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley showed how the "New Science" - revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology that are overturning centuries-old images of the universe - provides powerful insights into the design, leadership, and management of organizations. Now, in a completely revised and expanded edition, Wheatley uses her past seven years’ experience putting these ideas to use in a wide array of organizations all over the world to shed new light on issues crucial to organizing work, people, and life, including:
- How do systems move from chaos to order?
- How is order different from control?
- How can we reconcile individual autonomy and organizational order?
- How can we create more participative, open, and adaptive organizations?
- What are the keys to organizational growth, learning, and communication?
This revised edition is written in even more accessible language and adds an entirely new chapter to this now classic book. In "Change-The Capacity of Life," Wheatley explains how the new physics offers an entirely new understanding of change, in which change happens at the level of identity rather than by isolating and changing one defective part of ourselves or our organizations.
In a new epilogue, Wheatley adds a personal chronicle of her experiences since the publication of the first edition. She tells about the shift in her own understanding that occurred as she came to realize that Leadership and the New Science not only presents an alternative view of organizational dynamics but challenges people’s most fundamental beliefs about the way the world works.
Like the first edition, the book includes a special section of color photographs of beautiful patterns and processes-including fractals, strange attractors, and chemical clocks-that take readerson a mind-opening journey into the heart of the new science.
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Robert D. Steele (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
This book is beyond five stars, and not just for business, where it is receiving all the praise it is due, but within government, where it has not yet been noticed. It was recommended to me by the author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and I now recommend it to everyone I know. If there are two books that can "change the world," these are the ones.
Although the Chinese understood all this stuff centuries ago (Yin/Yang, space between the dots, the human web), the author is correct when she notes late in the book that the commoditization of the human worker (Cf. Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System) and the emphasis on scientific objectivity and scientific manager (Cf. Jean Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) were perhaps the greatest error we might have made in terms of long-run progress. Coincidentally, as I finished the book, on the Discovery channel in the background they were discussing how the leveeing of the Mississippi blocked the Louisiana watershed from cleansing the Mississippi naturally, as it once used to.
It's all about systems--the author does cite Donella Meadows' 1982 article in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly, but does not pay much heed to the large body of literature that thrived in the 1970's around the Club of Rome.
There are perhaps three bottom lines in this book that I would recommend to any government leader who hopes to stabilize and reconstruct our world:
1) Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. Blocking or controlling information flows stunts our growth and virtually assures defeat if not death. It is the optimization of listening-being open to all information (and especially all the information the secret world now ignores)-that optimizes our ability to adjust, evolve, and grow.
2) Command & control is history, block and wire diagrams are history. General Al Gray had it right in the 1990's when he talked about "commander's intent" as the baseline. Leaders today need to be disruptive, to look for dissonant views and news, and to empower all individuals at all levels with both information, and the authority to act on that information.
3) Disorder is an opportunity. We have the power to define ourselves, our "opponents," and our circumstances in ways that can either inspire protective, constricted, secretive, "armed" responses, or inclusive, open, sharing "pro-active" peaceful responses.
The author is to be praised for noting early on in the book that "Ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in the relationship any organization has with colleagues, stakeholders, and communities." I would extend that to note that social ethics and foreign policy ethics are the foundation for sustainable life on the planet, and we appear to be a long way from understanding that it is ethics, not guns, that will stabilize and fertilize...Cf Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
It also merits comment that the author essentially kills the industry of forecasting, scenarios, modeling, and futures simulations. I agree with her view (and that of others) that early warning is achieved, not through the theft of secret plans and intentions or the forecasting of behavior, but rather by casting a very wide net, listening carefully to all that is openly available, sharing it very widely (as the LINUX guys say, put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug will be invisible), and then being open to changed relationships. Trying to maintain the status quo will simply not do.
I give the author credit for carrying out an extraordinary survey of the literature on quantum mechanics, and for developing a PhD-level explanation of why old organization theory, based on the linear concepts of Newtonian physics, is bad for us, and how the new emergent organization theory, understood by too few, is let about the things and more about the relationships between and among the things.
This is an elegant essay and a heroic personal work of discovery, interpretation, and integration. While I would have liked to see more credit given to Kuhn, Drucker, Garfield, Brand, Rheingold, and numerous others that I have reviewed here for Amazon, on balance, given the academic narrowness of her Harvard PhD, I think the author has performed at the Olympic level. This is a radical book, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Hampden-Turner's book, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. which as I recall was not accepted by Harvard as a thesis at the time. Perhaps Harvard is evolving (smile).
For other key books that complement and precede this book, see my lists on information society, collective intelligence, business intelligence, and intelligence qua spies and secrecy in an open world.
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1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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