“Where Have All the Leaders Gone?”: An Interview With Margaret J. Wheatley on Life-Affirming Leadership

Margaret J. Wheatley's (1992) Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World offered a practical and hopeful perspective of leaders in a chaotic world. Excerpts of interviews with Wheatley in 2003 and 2004 are presented. The monolithic, one-size-fits-all theory of leadership that is a result of globalization and the primacy of the American management model must be broken. It doesn't work anywhere, it doesn't work in the US. Emergence is a self-organizing process for taking local actions to achieve global impact. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, preconceived strategic plans or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring to life simultaneously around the system. She has seen firsthand a number of young leaders who are working in the most difficult parts of the world pioneering new forms of leadership in places like Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Croatia.