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It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. —MARGARET WHEATLEY
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Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time)
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In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (A Simpler Way)
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Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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The river never drinks its own water. The tree never tastes its own fruit. The field never consumes its own harvest. They selflessly strive for the well-being of all those around them. —Mewari proverb, India
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now)
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The two skills of the warrior are compassion and insight. Compassion is easy - it arises spontaneously from an open heart. Insight or discernment requires more skill. We have to choose our battles.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (A Simpler Way)
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To name is to make visible.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now)
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The things we fear most in organisations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we're willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act - it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)
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ผู้คนยังคงมีจิตใจงดงามและมีความห่วงหาอาทร
เราอาจทุกข์ตรม จับต้นชนปลายไม่ถูก ด้านชาและหวาดหวั่น
แต่ลึกลงไปภายใต้ความรู้สึกเหล่านี้ เรายังคงปรารถนาที่จะเรียนรู้ ปรารถนาในอิสระภาพ ความหมาย และความรัก
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future)
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Amid all the information available in our environment, which identity filter(s) do you use? Are you dedicated to popularity, to a role, to a cause, an ethic, a nation, an ethnicity? What identity gives meaning to your life?
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control
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Tod Bolsinger (Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory)
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The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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ความหวังไม่ใช่หนทางในการเยียวยาความสิ้นหวัง หากแต่เป็นการค้นให้พบว่า เราต้องการจะทำอะไรกับสิ่งที่เราห่วงใยต่างหาก
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future)
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ความรักเรียกร้องเรามากมายเสียยิ่งกว่ากฎหมาย
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future)
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A culture focused on individual freedom can only result in narcissism, polarization, conflict, estrangement, and loneliness. What is the meaning of life when it’s all about me?
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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… we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence …
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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You can't hate someone whose story you know by Margaret J Wheatley is one of the themes that propels BENEATH THE FLAMES.
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Gregory Lee Renz
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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.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)
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Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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ELOS INSTITUTE, BRAZIL FROM POWER TO PLAY On the warrior’s path, it is up to you to discern which threads have been woven by divine hands and which have been woven by human hands. When you begin to discern the difference, you become a Txucarramãe—a warrior without weapons. … When you discover what you have been doing with your life and how it is you dance through the world, little by little you let go of your weapons, those creations made to kill creations. Suddenly, you discover that when we stop creating enemies, we extinguish the need for weapons. —Kaká Werá Jecupé Indigenous teacher in Brazil
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now)
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possible if we spoke to those we most fear.
I hope we can reclaim conversation as our route back to each other, and as the path forward to a hopeful future. It only requires imagination and courage and faith. These are qualities possessed by everyone. Now is the time to exercise them to their fullest.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future)
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In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)
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Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, “serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t.”36
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Margaret J. Wheatley (So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World)
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You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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The Dalai Lama’s Principles for Ethical Strategies3 Ensure that compassion is the motivation. Any problem must take into account the big picture and long-term consequences rather than short-term feasibility. In applying reason, we must stay honest, unbiased, and self-aware, vigilant to avoid self-delusion. Stay humble—know the limits of our knowledge and also realize we can easily be misguided in a rapidly changing reality. The foremost concern is the well-being of humanity and the planet we inhabit.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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So many books. Cookbooks with garish colors, full of pictures of plump brown birds and things mummy-wrapped in bandages of bacon. Plays and slender volumes of poetry with surnames I didn’t recognize. Endless books on World War II and Adolf Hitler, branded with the ubiquitous stark and menacing swastika. The Joy Of Sex, Ribald Rhymes, Dirty Limericks, Hemingway, Mailer, Fitzgerald, Salinger. Montague Summers. Wheatley, Crowley, Castaneda. Manson. Edgar Cayce, LaVey, Margaret Murray. Abrecan Geist. Colin Wilson. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, many volumes. Dirty Jokes—hundreds of paperbacks with spines whitened with a thousand cracks. Lovecraft, Kuttner, Silverberg, Heinlein, and Sturgeon. Vonnegut. Older books whose names had long been rubbed from their ancient covers.
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Matthew M. Bartlett (Creeping Waves)
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Almost 20 years ago, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers began A Simpler Way, a prophetic book about what organizations could be, with these words: There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play and creativity. Seeking after what’s possible. Being willing to learn and be surprised. The simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It does not need us humans to organize it. This simpler way summons forth what is best about us. It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically. It identifies us as creative. It acknowledges that we seek after meaning. It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives. It does not separate play from the nature of being. … The world we had been taught to see was alien to our humanness. We were taught to see the world as a great machine. But then we could find nothing human in it. Our thinking grew even stranger—we turned this world-image back on ourselves and believed that we too were machines. Because we could not find ourselves in the machine world we had created in thought, we experienced the world as foreign and fearsome. … Fear led to control. We wanted to harness and control everything. We tried, but it did not stop the fear. Mistakes threatened us; failed plans ruined us; relentless mechanistic forces demanded absolute submission. There was little room for human concerns. But the world is not a machine. It is alive, filled with life and the history of life. … Life cannot be eradicated from the world, even though our metaphors have tried. … If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of? If we are free to play, to experiment and discover, if we are free to fail, what might we create? What could we accomplish if we stopped trying to structure the world into existence? What could we accomplish if we worked with life’s natural tendency to organize? Who could we be if we found a simpler way?143
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong. This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls6 claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves. The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone. But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.7 Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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1. Recall those leaders you’ve most admired, those you were happy to serve under. What were their behaviors? How did you feel working for them? What kind of worker were you, including the quality of what you produced? How do you feel about them now? 2. Recall your own moments when you were proud of the leadership (either formal or informal) you provided to your organization, family, friends, community. What did you do? How did you behave toward others? What were the results of your leadership? Are you still in a relationship with any of these people?
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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As Grace argues, echoing author Margaret Wheatley, movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.
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Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
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You have to take a stand, and stand there. Daniel Ellsberg
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Margaret Wheatley
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You can’t hate someone whose story you know.” —Margaret Wheatley, EdD, author and community building expert
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Heather Holleman (The Six Conversations: Pathways to Connecting in an Age of Isolation and Incivility)
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Sane leadership is the unshakeable confidence that people can be generous, creative, and kind. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for these qualities to be evoked and utilized to accomplish good work.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations)
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Sanity is an honest relationship with reality. Sanity is seeing clearly, free of our filters, judgments, biases. When we see what’s going on, then we can discern what actions might be useful. Sanity creates possibilities.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations)
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In this way, dissipative structures demonstrate that disorder can be a source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World)
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I have worked with women religious for more than twenty-five years. Shortly after the publication of Leadership and the New Science, a colleague gave me great advice. He said that if I was interested in organizations that worked from a strong sense of values, then I should be working with the military and nuns.
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Margaret J. Wheatley
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We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent—attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. —Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
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Jeffrey K. Liker (The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer)
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A Warrior for the Human Spirit is a decent human being who aspires to be of service in an indecent, inhumane time.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. —Margaret Wheatley
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Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time)
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is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control
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Tod Bolsinger (Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory)
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We could have been anything we wanted, yet our free-floating individualism has taken us far from community, contribution or connection, the very things that truly give life meaning and purpose.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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It’s been said thousands of times, in all faiths and philosophies. Know thyself. What may be less clear in these wise expressions is the reason we learn to know ourselves: we develop a knowledge of self so that we can give up the self and serve others.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Wherever you’re working is where you take a stand. You don’t have to go looking for new places, other issues, compelling causes.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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We can’t change this world, but we can change ourselves so that we can be of service to this world.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Focus on serving others. ... No matter what is going on around us, we can attend to the people in front of us, to the issues confronting us and there, we offer what we can. We can offer insight and compassion. We can be present. We can stay and not flee. We can be exemplars of the best human qualities. That is a life well lived, even if we didn’t save the world.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose To Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Most of us have no idea of the assumptions and beliefs we use to create or perceptions. We think we're open-minded and curious when, in fact, we all suffer from "paradigm blindness.
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Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science)