The Sweeney Agency

About Margaret Wheatley - Business Management and Leadership Speaker:

Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about how we might accomplish our work, sustain our relationships, and willingly step forward to serve in this troubling time. She works from the belief that whatever the problem, community is the answer. Meg has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth. Her first work was as a PeaceCorps volunteer in Korea and a public school teacher and urban education administrator in New York. She has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts.

Since 1973, Meg has worked 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 energy, 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.

She co-founded The Berkana Institute in 1991, a charitable global foundation that works in partnership with a rich diversity of people around the world who are living the future now. Each of Berkana’s partners strengthen their communities by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in their people, traditions and environment. The Institute has worked in dozens of countries, most of them in the developing world.

She has served in a formal advisory capacity for leadership programs in England, Croatia, Denmark, Australia and the UnitedStates, and through her work in Berkana, with leadership initiatives in India, Senegal, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil as well as Europe.

Meg’s path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science was first published in 1992, and has been translated into 18 languages. This book is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations. It is a standard text in many leadership programs, and has won notable awards. The video of Leadership and the New Science, produced by CRM films, has also won several film awards. Meg’s newest book, coauthored with Deborah Frieze, is WalkOut Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (2011). This book takes you inside seven communities around the world (each of whom Berkana has partnered with) who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities.

In 2010, Meg published Perseverance, a personal guide for those who seek to persevere, to those who hope that their work and life contribute to making things better, not worse, for the people, issues and places they love. Other books by Margaret Wheatley are A Simpler Way,co-authored with Myron Rogers, Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, and Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time.

Meg received her doctorate from Harvard University’s program in Administration, Planning and Social Policy. She holds an M.A. in Communications and Systems Thinking from New York University, and a B.A. in History from the University of Rochester. She has received several awards and honorary doctorates. In 2002, The American Society for Training and Development honored her for distinguished contribution to workplace learning and development and dubbed her a living legend.

What Margaret Wheatley Talks About:

Meg draws her ideas from many places, beginning with the discoveries in new science that profoundly shift our worldview. To her science background, she adds the perspectives and wisdom from many different disciplines, cultures and spiritual traditions that she has learned from. She writes frequently for professional journals and magazines.

Popular Topics Include:

• Leading in a Networked World
• Leading in Turbulent Times
• The Power of Conversation to Change Our World