Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Who Do We Choose to Be?
Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity
This book seeks to restore leadership as a noble profession, offering a path for leaders to engage well and sanely with the destructive dynamics of this time. Deepening the insights in her classic Leadership and the New Science, Wheatley uses two lenses to understand where we are and how we got here: the new science of living systems and the pattern of collapse in complex civilizations. Each of them is powerful on its own; together they offer tremendous explanatory power.
Wheatley begins each section with "What Science Teaches"--explaining a specific dynamic common to all living systems. The six dynamics explored in separate sections are time, identity, information, self-organization, perception, and interconnectedness.
Each section has several short essays. In "Facing Reality," the two lenses of science and the pattern of collapse are used to describe the causes of many of our most troubling and disturbing personal and social behaviors, especially those of importance to leaders. Subsequent essays are organized under "Claiming Leadership" and "Restoring Sanity." In these, Wheatley answers the question, In our current reality, what is sane leadership? She uses a combination of commentary, actual practices, quotes, and stories to bring into focus the qualities and actions that support good leadership and create "islands of sanity."
The stories she tells of leaders with whom she's worked are exceptionally diverse: from nuns to military commanders. But these leaders are deeply unified in how they work with people and partner with life. In the concluding chapters, she brings in her current work, calling on us to develop the qualities of compassion, insight, and presence as "warriors for the human spirit," creating workplaces and communities where people can still be generous, creative, and kind.
Synopsis
This book is born of my desire to summon us to be leaders for this time as things fall apart, to reclaim leadership as a noble profession that creates possibility and humaneness in the midst of increasing fear and turmoil.
I know it is possible for leaders to use their power and influence, their insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings, to create the conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community and love to be evoked no matter what. I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas. I know it is possible because I have worked with leaders over many years in places that knew chaos and breakdown long before this moment. And I have studied enough history to know that such leaders always arise when they are most needed. Now it's our turn.