I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.
Margaret J. WheatleyRead
In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.
Interpretation
We must reduce aggression in order to effectively solve our societal issues.
This quote highlights the necessity of collaboration and harmony in addressing the significant challenges we face in today's society. Margaret J. Wheatley emphasizes that overcoming aggression and fostering cooperation are vital for creating positive change and resolving conflicts, suggesting that our current culture requires a shift towards more peaceful and constructive interactions.
In practice
This quote could inspire a workplace meeting focused on improving teamwork.
I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.
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.
Even though worker capacity and motivation are destroyed when leaders choose power over productivity, it appears that bosses would rather be in control than have the organization work well.
Our willingness to acknowledge that we only see half the picture creates the conditions that make us more attractive to others. The more sincerely we acknowledge our need for their different insights and perspectives, the more they will be magnetized to join us.
They have eliminated rigidity, both physical and psychological, in order to support more fluid processes whereby temporary teams are created to deal with specific and ever-changing needs. They have simplified roles into minimal categories; they have knocked down walls and created workplaces where people, ideas, and information circulate freely.
It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
In the 1970s, girls didn't do anything. It wasn't their fault. For me and the other working-class girls I hung around with, our route was plotted - you were a secretary and a wife. I wanted to hitchhike around the world, go on motorbikes, be in bands.
Each moment is a moment of choice ~ a time to leave the old, the limited, the restrained, and the contracted for the new, the unbound, and the liberating potential that expands before you.
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
At Kobe, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue, which had been growing all my life.
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