Margaret Wheatley

Margaret Wheatley Speaker Biography

Margaret Wheatley is an acclaimed writer and speaker.  She has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth.  Her first work was a public school teacher and an urban education administrator in New York, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea.  She also has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts.

For the past decade, she has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on six different continents. Her clients and audiences range from the head of the U.S. Army to twelve-year-old Girl Scouts, from CEO’s to small town ministers.  This diversity includes small town 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 relentless pressure for speed and change in chaotic environments.  But there is another similarity: A common human desire to live together more harmoniously, more humanely. 

Margaret’s latest work is Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. In Walk Out Walk On, Margaret and co-author Deborah Frieze invite you on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need.

Magaret’s path-breaking book, Leadership and the New Science, was first published in 1992. This book is credited with establishing a fundamentally new approach to how we think about organizations.  It has been translated into twelve languages and won many awards, including “Best Management book of 1992” in Industry Week, TopTen Business Books of the 1990’s in C/O Magazine, and Top Ten Business Books of all time by Xerox Corporation.  A new edition was published in 1991, significantly revised, updated and expanded.  The video of Leadership and the New Science, produced by CRM films, has won several film awards.

In her new book, Perseverance, Wheatley offers help to those who seek to persevere.  If you hope that your work and life contribute to making things better, not worse, for the people, issues and places you love, this book shows you how to persevere, remaining steadfast & persistent no matter what.

A Simpler Way, co-authored with Myron-Kellner Rogers in 1996 explores the question: Could we organize human endeavor differently if we understood how Life organizes?  Through photos, poetry, and prose, the book explains self-organization, and the conditions that nurture it in life and organizations.

Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, was published in December 2001. Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time was released in January, 2005. 

Dr. Wheatley received her doctorate from HarvardUniversity’s program in Administration, Planning and Social Policy. She holds an MA in Communications and System Thinking from New YorkUniversity, and has also been a research associate at YaleUniversity. She has been a fellow of the WorldBusinessAcademy, The Kings Fund, England, and an advisor to the Fetzer Institutes Fellows Program. In 2003, she received the American Society for Training & Development’s highest award, the “Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance.”