Product Description

Constructed around five major themes -- play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence -- A Simpler Way challenges the way we live and work, presenting a profound worldview.

In thoughtful, creative prose, the authors help readers connect their own personal experiences to the idea that organizations are evolving systems. With its relaxed, poetic style, A Simpler Way will help readers increase their organizing capacity and free them from the daily stress that disorganization brings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46227 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 135 pages

Amazon.com
Strikingly different from most business books--it opens and closes with a pair of very powerful black-and-white photo essays, for example--A Simpler Way lays out a fascinating and productive reexamination of the traditional tenets of organizational behavior. Internationally known consultants Margaret J. Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science) and Myron Kellner-Rogers focus on the basic themes of play, organization, self, emergence, and notions of coherence to explore how people really systemize their existence. The authors draw upon science, poetry, philosophy, and other unconventional corporate resources to suggest a completely original method of working together. "There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor," they write. "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."

While A Simpler Way may appear too New Age for some readers, this beautifully produced book hits the mark by bringing together an array of unexpected ideas as the authors look anew at established theories of human behavior to propose a decidedly unique way of promoting organization and achieving success. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly
Addressing readers who perceive their lives as nearly unmanageable, the authors, business consultants and cofounders of the Berkana Institute, elegantly suggest a new way to view endeavor. Are we governed by static images of the world as a great machine, they ask, or do we see the world as an ever-changing, creative, living organism? The authors present material from myriad academic disciplines to shore up their fundamental propositions that the universe is a creative experience, that life self-organizes, that organizations are living systems. Even light bulbs "have exhibited a breathtaking tendency to self-organize when wired together with other bulbs," the authors observe. Organizing, they maintain, is a "deep impulse" and not one just found in living beings. Self-organizing calls us to partner with the world's creative forces, for life, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers aver, has the capacity to invent itself. The advice here is more inspirational than particular or hands-on. It represents a vigorous, path-breaking application of findings from the cutting edge of science to inner questions about how to live a life, however, and so should find a ready readership among those who cotton to Chopra, Capra and the like. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

David Whyte, poet and author of The Hearth Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
A Simpler Way is a marvelous raid on the unspeakable and invisible world which permeates every human attempt to work together. The writing is meditative, clear and uncluttered, yet exactly to the point. Destined to be a classic.

Customer Reviews

A very interesting book
This book was recommended to me by a friend but it was very difficult to find it in Greece. I find it very interesting and well written book.

Symbiosis is the norm
This elegant and poetic little book offers a new way to look at organization. It is of particular interest to those who work within formal organizations, but the observations apply to all endeavors. The authors suggest that much of what we do to impose order is wasted effort. Life is self-organizing. Life loves organization. Darwinian ideas taught us that only the fittest survive and life is a struggle. New evolutionary theory suggests that the FIT usually survive, and life is cooperative more often than competitive. Most of us learned that symbiosis is an an occasional anomaly in interspecies relations, but the truth is that symbiosis is the norm. Ten percent of a human being (dry weight) is bacteria. We are colonies, not individuals, and life ("As we know it, Bob?" "Yes, Ray. As we know it.") would be impossible without such interdependence. The upshot is that as the highest life form in this sea of cooperation we can relax and expect order instead of disorder. The authors are corporate consultants and tell their clients that businesses, clubs, community groups, and all the other ways we work together, work best if allowed to self organize: Suggest a goal and let the team create solutions. Though the book includes no concrete examples, the picture that sprang to my mind is the team approach to car building used by Saturn and Volvo among others. Provoking photos segue you into and out of the book, and A SIMPLER WAY will remain lurking in the back of your noggin.

Fluffy, repetitious
Not bad, but the material could have been covered in a magazine article. A few principles repeated until I felt like I was reading some sort of New Age meditative mantra.