These are books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past several years.  There are Amazon.com links for those items available through Amazon.com.  Please let me know of your favorites and new discoveries that are not listed. 

Leadership and the New Science Revised: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
by Margaret J. Wheatley

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
When Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science was initially published in 1992, it outlined an unquestionably unique but extremely challenging view of change, leadership, and the structure of groups. Many readers immediately embraced its cutting-edge perspective, but others just could not understand how the complicated scientific tenets it described could be used to reshape institutions. Now Wheatley, an organizational specialist who has since coauthored A Simpler Way, updates the original by including additional material (such as an epilogue addressing her personal experiences during the past decade) and reconstructing some of her more challenging concepts. The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice, then investigates ways that biology and chemistry affect living systems, and finally focuses on chaos theory, the creation of a new order, and the manner that scientific principles affect leadership. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer," she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organizations worthy of human habitation." --Howard Rothman

Janet McCallen

Wow!  There are probably more words highlighted in my now well-thumbed copy than there are unhighlighted.  From my highlights:  “If power is the capacity generated by our relationships, then we need to be attending to the quality of those relationships.”  Or “We could ask about the messages that fill the space of the organization, thinking of these messages as an organizational field that is influencing behavior.”  And:  “A clear sense of identity is the only route to achieving independence from the environment.  When the environment seems to demand a response, there is a means to interpret that demand.”  If I had to point to one book that is the underpinning and explanation of seeing organizations organically rather than mechanistically, this would be it.

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Last modified: 12/30/05