Margaret Wheatley, PhD
Authority on Leadership in Chaotic Times

Dr. Margaret Wheatley (Meg) writes, teaches, and speaks about how we might organize and accomplish our work in chaotic times. She invites us to attend to the quality of our relationships to weather the increasing turbulence. She knows 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 Peace Corps 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 integrity and effectiveness as they cope with the relentless upheavals and rapid shifts in 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 1992, a charitable global foundation that works in partnership with a rich diversity of people around the world who 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 Third World, and has discovered that the world is blessed with tens of thousands of courageous, life-affirming leaders.

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

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.

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 2003, The American Society for Training and Development honored her for “distinguished contribution to workplace learning and development” and dubbed her “a living legend”. In April 2005, she was elected to the Leonardo Da Vinci Society for her contribution to the development of the field of systems thinking.