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Thought Leaders
Industry Gurus Live
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Dear $firstname,
Welcome to the Thought Leaders - Best Practices from HR Executives Newsletter! You are receiving this email because as a member of the HR.com community you have expressed an interest in receiving our Thought Leaders update. It is our mission at HR.com to always provide you with the most relevant and up-to-date HR information. To alter your subscription preferences or noted areas of interest please update your online profile here. New articles are added daily. |
Thought Leader: Meg Wheatley on "Finding our Way in an Uncertain Time"
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Originally posted in May 2006, Meg Wheatley's interview has generated a huge response, having been viewed by over one thousand of our members. Meg is also participating in HR.com's Employers of Excellence National Event in October 2006. Margaret (Meg) Wheatley spoke with HR.com's Leadership analyst, Karen Elmhirst about a simpler way to organize human endeavor.
Margaret (Meg) Wheatley is an internationally acclaimed speaker and writer, and she is also Founder and President Emeritus of The Berkana Institute. 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 US Army to the Girl Scouts, from CEOs to small-town ministers.
Meg's path-breaking book "Leadership and the New Science" was first published in 1992 and has been translated into 17 languages. This book has won several notable awards including "Best Management Book of 1992" in Industry Week, "Top Ten Business Books of the 1990's in CIO Magazine, and "Top Ten Business Books of All Times" by Xerox Corporation. A new edition was published in 1999, significantly revised, updated, and expanded. "Turning to One Another - Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future" was published in 2002. It proposes that it is the simple familiar act of conversation that offers the most hope for changing the world. Her newest book is "Finding Our Way - Leadership for an Uncertain Time" is a collection of her practice-focused articles. Meg applies the themes addressed throughout her career to detail the organizational and personal practices and behaviors that bring them to light.
She received her Doctorate from Harvard University's Program and Administration Planning and Social Policy. She holds an M.A. in Communication and Systems Thinking from New York University and has also been a Research Associate at Yale. She has received several awards and honorary doctorates. The American Society for Training and Development has honored her with the title "A Living Legend." In May 2003, she 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, public schools and churches as well as corporations. Through the Berkana Institute, a charitable foundation that 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 the 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.
KE: Our topic today is "Finding Our Way in an Uncertain Time." The first line of this book states, "There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor." Meg, tell us about that simpler way.
MW: Well first l want to give a little history to that line, "There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor." It has actually appeared in every one of my books. It seems to be something that I just want to keep out in front of us that it seems more and more timely to talk about a simpler way. The reason it is more timely is because as we continue to grow in complexity and complicatedness and get really mired down now in a world of organizations, is seemingly unending policies, procedures, measurements, and standards. This dream that, or this yearning for a simpler way, I am finding is stronger and stronger in people around the world. Its basic principles are that the simpler way would be to trust people. I remind you about Ricardo Semler with his work in Brazil with Semco and he got quite a lot notoriety for this, but he took his manufacturing company from very complicated policies and procedures to absolutely none. I am not really advocating that, but he just went to a zero-base for policies and procedures and when I asked why he got rid of everything, he said, "Well, one day I just looked around the organization and I realized that I had adults working for me," and for me that is really what a simpler way is based on. It is based on the recognition that the people who are working with us are adults, that they are creative, they are capable of taking responsibility, they are interested in doing work that feels meaningful and purposeful, they are very interested in having good relationships with their colleagues and co-workers. The way that life organizes this whole planet is also what is embodied in that statement, a simpler way, because life does not organize hierarchically, life uses this wonderful capacity of everything alive to self-organize, to notice what needs to be done, and then create the relationships, the networks and the structures that make it possible to do good work. So the essence of the simpler way, I think, is restoring to our organizations the understanding that people want to do good work and need to be treated as competent adults.
KE: That brings up a very interesting point. I have done some reading about Semco and there are a few other organizations that are often referred to, like W.L. Gore. Why is it that so few organizations have attempted this type of style that really trusts people and empowers them to create the structures that they need?
MW: What I found is that instead of looking for entire organizations, if you start looking within any of the large corporations, you will find in their history that they have pockets of very forward-thinking managers and leaders who are absolutely convinced of the need to create a self organized, self empowered, participative, high engagement. We have used a lot of words these days, but basically have made this conversion. I use that word deliberately because in the leaders that I worked with really got religious about this. They understood that the only way to deal with the complexity of their work problems was to fully engage the intelligence, hearts and minds of their staff and of their workers. Once a leader understands that and works with it, then you cannot get them to go backwards. I do not think there are whole large corporations that have ever converted to this, but on the other hand, always within any large system, you will find pioneering leaders and you will find leaders who are courageous enough to go to bat for their team and create the conditions that make it possible for them to work in a very self-managed way.
KE: You describe the source of a lot of our troubles today as a clash between the old story and the new story. What is the nature of this clash?
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Karen Elmhirst is a Senior Analyst with HR.com focused on learning and leadership. She is also co-host of our weekly Thought Leader Live interviews delivered via webcast each week. For a complete listing of our Thought Leader interviews,
click here.
Karen has over a dozen years of experience as a sales and marketing executive in various industries including recruitment and training, work as a communication coach, a writer, and editor. Karen graduated with a business degree from the University of British Columbia. |
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Sponsored by
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Join us for our next live Thought Leader interview with
Dr. Jac Fitz-enz on Workforce Intelligence
August 21, 2006
1:00 - 2:00 p.m. ET
In this live webcast you will learn:
- How to sort out the complexity of human capital return on investments.
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- The most important connection between human capital and business.
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This upcoming webcast is free for ALL Members of HR.com (MP3 and PowerPoint downloads only available to our Premier and Corporate members).
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If you enjoy the Thought Leader interviews, then you will enjoy our recently published book,
Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus
by HR.com Publishing
Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus is an amazing anthology of higher thinkers including, David Ulrich, Kenny Moore, Marshall Goldsmith and Erin Brockovich. It's 348-pages of exclusive interviews with top experts discussing the proven strategies, the philosophies, and the best methods they have used to strengthen their organizations. Each chapter features a different expert who reveals his/her best practices to help professionals deal with the people side of business.
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