Margaret (Meg) Wheatley, Ed.D., writes, teaches and speaks about how we can use our power and influence to willingly step forward to serve this troubling time, beginning her care for the world’s peoples in 1966 as a Peace Corps volunteer in post-war Korea and deepening through many different roles—speaker, teacher, consultant, advisor, formal leader—into an unshakable conviction that leaders must learn to invoke people’s inherent generosity, creativity, and need for community, with sane leadership on behalf of the human spirit being the only way forward as this world tears us apart. Since 1973, Wheatley has worked as an organizational consultant on every inhabited continent with an unusually broad variety of organizations, from the head of the U.S. Army to twelve-year-old Girl Scouts, from CEOs and government ministers to small town ministers, from large universities to rural aboriginal villages, serving as full-time graduate management faculty at two universities and formal advisor for leadership programs in England, Croatia, Denmark, Australia and the U.S. She is co-founder and president of The Berkana Institute and a prolific writer who has authored thirteen books, from the classic “Leadership and the New Science” (1992, translated into 21 languages) which won Industry Week’s best management book award and shifted the field of leadership by utilizing systems thinking, quantum physics, and chaos theory to create a new paradigm of organizational change, to “Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity” (2017, 2023) and “Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations” (2024). Her most creative work is “The Warrior’s Songline: A Journey Guided By Voice And Sound” (2020), a collaboration with musician Jerry Granelli that uses the geography of Utah (where Meg lives) to provide guidance and training for those choosing to be Warriors for the Human Spirit through a powerful form of teaching created by Australian Aboriginals that embeds critical knowledge in a landscape. For the past nine years since 2015, Wheatley has been training leaders and activists from more than 35 countries as Warriors for the Human Spirit, an in-depth training program and path of service supported by a robust global community, with her warriorship grounded in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa and her teacher Pema Chödrön. Wheatley received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University in 1979, her Masters in Media Ecology with Neil Postman from N.Y.U., and her Bachelor’s from the University of Rochester, and has been honored for her ground-breaking work by many professional associations, universities and organizations including the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2014) and being named one of five living legends by the American Society for Training and Development, with her website designed as a library and resource offering articles, videos, podcasts, poetry, and others’ work that inspires her, all downloadable for free.
Why their voice matters: Wheatley pioneered applying living systems science, chaos theory, and quantum physics to organizational leadership, demonstrating that organizations function as living systems rather than machines, while her Warriors for the Human Spirit training offers leaders frameworks for maintaining sanity, generosity, and community in the face of civilizational collapse, providing discipline and dedication to develop stable minds and skillful ways of being that serve the human spirit rather than succumbing to the fragmentation and dehumanization of our troubling times.