Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. She works to create organizations of all types where people are known as the blessing, not the problem. She is president of The Berkana Institute, www.berkana.org, a charitable global leadership foundation serving life-affirming leaders, and has been an organizational consultant for many years, as well as a professor of management in two graduate programs. Her latest book, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, (January 2002) proposes that real social change comes from the ageless process of people thinking together in conversation. Wheatley’s work also appears in two award-winning books, Leadership and the New Science (1992, 1999) and A Simpler Way (with Myron Kellner-Rogers, 1996,) plus several videos and articles. She draws many of her ideas from new science and life’s ability to organize in self-organizing, systemic, and cooperative modes. And, increasingly her models for new organizations are drawn from her understanding of many different cultures and spiritual traditions. Her articles and work can be accessed at www.margaretwheatley.com.

Past and Current Clients:
For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on all continents. Her clients and audiences range from the head of the U.S. Army to twelve-year-old Girl Scouts, from CEOs to small town ministers. This diversity includes large corporations, government agencies, healthcare institutions, foundations, public schools, colleges, major church denominations, the armed forces, professional associations, and monasteries. All of these organizations are wrestling with a common dilemma—how to maintain their integrity and effectiveness as they cope with the relentless upheavals and rapid shifts of these chaotic times. But there is also another similarity: A common human desire to live together more harmoniously, more humanely.

Education:
Margaret received undergraduate degrees at the University of Rochester and University College London. In the mid-sixties, she spent two years in the Peace Corps in Korea. She received a Master of Arts degree from New York University in systems thinking and a doctorate from Harvard’s program in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy, with a focus on organizational behavior and change. Margaret served as full-time graduate management faculty at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and The Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Personal Information
Margaret loves to learn from different disciplines including science, history, English literature, systems thinking, organizational behavior, social policy and increasingly also from spiritual traditions. She believes that no one perspective can answer the questions that now confront the world. Margaret lives near Provo, Utah, when she is not traveling the world.

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