"We will need to become savvy about how to build relationships, how to nurture growing, evolving things. All of us will need better skills in listening, communicating, and facilitating groups, because these are the talents that build strong relationships."

Margaret Wheatley Science See all quotes by Margaret Wheatley →

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“When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.”

“Leadership is always dependent upon the context, but the context is established by the relationships.”

“There is a simpler, finer way to organize human endeavor. I have declared this for many years and seen it to be true in many places. This simpler way is demonstrated to us in daily life, not the life we see on the news with its unending stories of human grief and horror, but what we feel when we experience a sense of life's deep harmony, beauty, and power, of how we feel when we see people helping each other, when we feel creative, when we know we're making a difference, when life feels purposeful.”

“If vision is a field, think about what we could do differently to create one. We would do our best to get it permeating through the entire organization so that we could take advantage of its formative properties. All employees, in any part of the company, who bumped up against the field, would be influenced by it. Their behavior could be shaped as a result of “field meetings”, where their energy would link with the fields form to create behavior congruent with the organizations goals. In the absence of that field, in areas of the organization that hadn’t been reached, we could hold no expectation of desired behaviors. If the field hadn’t extended into that space, there would be nothing there to help behaviors materialize, no invisible geometry working on our behalf”

“In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.”

“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”

Resonant Thoughts

"A rich man had a garden and two gardeners. One of these gardeners was very lazy and did not work; but when the owner came to the garden, the lazy man would get up and fold his arms and say, "How beaut…"

— Swami Vivekananda

Religion1863–1902

#family

"The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I re…"

— Jack Kerouac

Literature1922–1969

#philosophy

"Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in dr…"

— Poul Anderson

Literature1926–2001

#mind

"If this referendum is about anything it is about what kind of Britain we are and what kind of Britain we aspire to become. We should be a leader in Europe, not simply a member. We should not be fully …"

— Gordon Brown

Politics1947–2001

#leadership