Margaret Wheatley

"In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions."

"Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges."

"We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions."

"The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs ofan impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity."

"The dense and tangled web of life-the interconnected nature of reality--now reveals itself on a daily basis. Since September 11th, think about how much youve learned about people, nations, and ways of life that previously youd known nothing about. Weve been learning how the lives of those far away affect our own. Were beginning to realize that in order to live peacefully together on this planet, we need to be in new relationships, especially with those far-distant from us."

"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about."