Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Simpler Way
    A Simpler Way
    A Simpler Way
    Ebook149 pages1 hour

    A Simpler Way

    By Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron E. Rogers

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities." So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor.

    Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: "How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive.

    A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors.

    The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations.

    The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
    Release dateJan 1, 1998
    ISBN9781605092546
    A Simpler Way
    Author

    Margaret J. Wheatley

    Margaret Wheatley is president emerita of the Berkana Institute. She has been a consultant since 1973, working in virtually every type of organization on all continents. She is coauthor of A Simpler Way and author of Turning to One Another and Finding Our Way as well as many articles, videos, and DVDs. She has also worked as a public school teacher, a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea, and as an associate professor of management at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and Cambridge College, Massachusetts.

    Read more from Margaret J. Wheatley

    Related to A Simpler Way

    Related ebooks

    Business For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE

      May 31, 2018

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Loving Your Inner Critic

      Jul 23, 2019

      Loving Your Inner Critic
      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Your Biology Runs on Feelings

      Jan 18, 2018

      I have long been interested in human affect—the world of emotions and feelings—and have spent many years investigating it: why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct ourselves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Fearless Organization

      May 1, 2019

      The Fearless Organization
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lost And Found: Bewilderment As An Invitation To Transformation

      Nov 10, 2021

      — When I get lost while driving in the Hudson Valley — which is often — I usually welcome seeing a new place. When one of my two young daughters asks me a thought-stopping question (“Papa, are we indigenous people anywhere on the planet?” “Papa, do o

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Ordinary Made Sublime

      Jan 13, 2022

      The Ordinary Made Sublime
      5 min read

    • Article

      BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

      Jan 26, 2021

      The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World Sarah Wilson • Dey St. Anyone who read Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, her remarkable 2018 memoir about shifting our approach to anxiety and mental illness, will have high expectatio

      8 min read

    • Article

      Konda Mason Has Love Capital

      May 16, 2018

      Konda Mason Has Love Capital
      19 min read

    • Article

      The Mother Of All Compassion

      Jun 16, 2022

      The Mother Of All Compassion
      4 min read

    • Article

      Share Your Wisdom

      Nov 1, 2018

      Share Your Wisdom
      6 min read

    • Article

      Creative Spiritual Living

      Sep 17, 2020

      Creative Spiritual Living
      4 min read

    • Article

      Does Your Life Light You Up?

      Apr 28, 2020

      Does Your Life Light You Up?
      4 min read

    • Article

      For Life’s Wonderful Moments

      Jan 27, 2020

      What inspired you to write your book? A published essay I wrote about mortality without faith and growing up with my parents [renowned astronomer Carl Sagan and writer and producer Ann Druyan] was the seed of the book. But it really started taking s

      2 min read

    • Article

      Always Different, Always the Same

      Feb 22, 2022

      The superb science journalist Sharon Begley, who wrote a regular column for Mindful until her untimely death in early 2021, was fond of studies of personality: the different types, how much they’re influenced by our environment and our relationships,

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Power of 'Onlyness'

      May 1, 2018

      How do you define ‘onlyness’? The word actually doesn’t appear in the English dictionary, but I would argue that it should. Simply put, it means that anyone’s — and quite possibly everyone’s — ideas matter. The genesis of the word starts with the fac

      7 min read

    • Article

      Joanna Macy Reconnects

      Nov 20, 2019

      Joanna Macy Reconnects
      10 min read

    • Article

      On Hope

      May 3, 2020

      A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I started sometimes asking, at the end of my conversations: “What makes you despair, and where are you finding hope?” It turns out that answers to the two parts of that question are more often conjoined than oppositional. The pu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Bookmark This read…listen…stream

      Apr 1, 2020

      How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage Kelly McGonigal, PhD • Avery McGonigal’s thesis is simple—as humans, we are hardwired for movement. She builds her case through a wide-ranging survey of scientific studies, interview

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Simpler Way

    3.5/5

    39 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      After reading Leadership and the New Science about 8 years ago, I was excited to find this book in a used bookstore not long ago. Unfortunately, I found that it spent too much time repeating the same "keep life simple, things have a way of organizing themselves from chaos to order, don't try to impose too much organization" messages over and over again, sometimes within the same chapter, sometimes across various different chapters. It sounded preachy rather than enlightening. I finally resorted to skimming the last few chapters before calling it quits.

    Book preview

    A Simpler Way - Margaret J. Wheatley

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1