A Simpler Way

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View books by WHEATLEY.

Organisational Poetry - Rated
Certianly, the best book on management in a post modern age I have ever read!
This poetic book doesn't just touch the mind but the spirit also. You are left inspired to believe that there is a Simpler Way to live in a pressure filled way. Pressure and stress is all about attitude and this book helps you to see life differently and gives you faith to believe life can be more fun!

Once your appetite has been whetted, go on to read Leadership and the New Science - it might do your head in, but it adds content to the poetry.

A simpler and much needed way - Rated
This book by Margaret Wheatley is without a doubt the most beautiful and unconventional business-related book I've ever read. It conveys it's message not only through prose, but also in poems and photographs.

And the message itself is simple and beautiful, namely that:
There is a simpler way to organize human endeavour. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play and creativity. Seeking after what's possible. Being willing to learn and to be surprised.

So what is this simpler way?

The book will tell you what it's not: It's not the world view fostered in Darwinism, that the world is a cruel place, in which only the strongest can thrive. This world view has been prevalent since Darwin.

And it's not mechanistic and reductionist either. According to this book, systems are irreducible. You cannot understand or predict a system by looking at it's components. The properties of the system are emergent, and only manifest themselves in the system. They are not present in the seperate components.

So they argue that the common western metaphor for life today, ie. "life as a struggle", is not in tune with the way the world (and life) organizes itself. Life organizes and evolves itself through relations and cooperation. Therefore, a much more accurate metaphore for life would be "life as play".

Seeing life as a game could have many implications for the way we live and organize our endeavours, but the principal promise of such a world view, is that it can make life easier and more fun.

The traditional view is that life is hard. Only those who work hard and struggle are succesful. You must make sacrifices to reach your goals. Especially work life is no picnic. This view is very common, and after having read this book, I'm convinced that it's totally false - or rather, it's true, but only because we make it true by believing that it's true.

The whole book is eminently quotable. Almost every paragraph holds succinct, interesting nuggets of information, presented in a simple but thought-provoking way. Here's an example:
We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.

The whole book is like that, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Read it!

If I may suggest an equally untraditional companion, consider seeing Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio. This is a movie with no plot, no actors and no dialogue. It's simply and hour and a half of nature contrasted with mans impact on nature. It illustrates beautifully the contrast between "life as struggle" and "life as play". And no. it's not boring at all, it's breath-taking.

Essential reading - Rated
It's late on a Sunday night and I've just finished reading "A Simpler Way" for the second time. It's one of those books that repays multiple readings as you delve deeper into what the authors are saying. It may be the best book I've ever read about creativity and organizational change, and I've read a bunch of 'em. It may change your life, if you let it. It's not "too New Age" at all - it's firmly grounded in the latest thinking in biology and other sciences. Basically, it says we are too controlled by inaccurate images of the world - specifically, the Darwinist belief in the "struggle" to survive and the machine metaphor. These two ways of looking at the world have predominated for decades now, and have percolated down into our lives, so that we think that such things as struggle, fierce competition, control, planning, rigidity, coercion, and so on, are the ways life is, and are the ways to organize our lives. WRONG, say the authors. The world actually is very different from what the Darwinists and the machine-as-metaphor people have said. According to the latest and best studies of evolution, biology, physics, nature, etc., the world is a lot more interested in cooperation, connections, synergy, alliances, freedom, etc., than we thought, and we can, if we're brave enough, allow THESE images of the world to pervade our lives and our companies.

A disappointment - Rated
Simply put, the book lacks content. Not only are the words and paragraphs rather sparsely distributed throughout the pages, but little knowledge is actually shared with the reader.

The authors appear to want to impart a lyric quality to the work, perhaps akin to poetry. Rather, the incessant drumbeat of short, choppy sentences is distracting. The mantric use of pronouns in the first-person plural is likewise grating -- the authors certainly don't speak for me.

a stunning view of life - Rated
living live without the fear of western-oriented philosophical thought...messy and creative, this book was a gift, perhaps not too late in life.