Leadership and the New Science. - book reviews

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 15, 1993 by James A. Autry

Newton and his apple are out, relationships and holism are in--in both the new physics and magazine editing.

At the National Magazine Awards luncheon held last April, all the winners, without exception, gave credit and paid tribute to their staffs. It's a standard thing to do, of course, and some observers might be cynical about the parade of editors, including some of our well-publicized superstars, actually saying that they didn't do it all alone.

Not me. No successful editor, I think, has any illusions about the true formula for genius: 10 percent vision, 90 percent relationships with the people who turn that vision into ink on paper. And the true geniuses are those who have learned, somehow, to master the art of those relationships. As we know, the business schools and the business books don't give us very much guidance.

But now comes a book on leadership and organizational development that brings both scientific observation and wise philosophy to the dynamics of how people are together in organizations and how they should be. Interestingly enough, this book could just as well be discussing the editing process itself. It's called Leadership and the New Science, and is written by Margaret J. Wheatley (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). The author is an associate professor of management at Brigham Young University and president of the Berkana Institute. She was a founding member of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's firm, Goodmeasure, Inc. (And before going further, let me nominate Professor Wheatley for a place on the American Magazine Conference program. She would, without doubt, stop the show.)

Her premise in the book is fairly simple: Because of the profound influence of Newtonian physics on our thinking and the way we perceive our environment, we have tried to organize our world, including our institutions, using the analogy of machines that can be separated into parts. By extension, we feel that if we can take things apart and work on the individual components, polishing them up or replacing them as need be, we will then be able to reassemble the "machine" and it will work just fine--maybe even better.

The problem, as anyone who has been in management for any length of time knows, is that organizations just don't seem to work that way. The reason, says Professor Wheatley, is simple enough: Life itself doesn't work that way. We are not machines--and our organizations have been improperly conceived as machines.

Stranger than fiction

She points out that science has changed radically, so radically, in fact, that the very people who were making the early discoveries about "the new sciences" were shocked by their findings and did not want to believe what they were uncovering. It was too threatening to the seeming orderliness of the world, too radical a departure from what had been known and understood.

What were they discovering? Chaos, for one thing, and yet, a new kind of order, an "exquisite order" within chaos. In her book, Professor Wheatley examines "the new sciences," including quantum physics, chaos theory, field theory and others. In so doing, she finds lessons for leadership and organizational development and behavior.

One overwhelming observation made by these new scientists is that, at the particle level, nothing is separate, nothing exists except in relationship to everything else. Whereas Newtonian physics focused on things rather than relationships, the new physics focuses on "a movement toward holism ... understanding the system as a system and giving primary value to the relationships that exist among seemingly discrete parts."

Professor Wheatley observes that "... insights I gain from quantum physics, whether I take them literally or metaphorically, quickly return me to a central truth. A quantum universe is enacted only in an environment rich in relationships |emphasis mine~. Nothing happens in the quantum world without something encountering something else. Nothing is independent of the relationships that occur. ... This is a world of process, not a world of things."

Before you think this book is so steeped in metaphor that there are no real-life management lessons, I should point out that Professor Wheatley thoroughly understands business and management, its challenges and disciplines. She also has consulted for an impressive list of Fortune 500 companies.

The phrase, "a world of process" should resonate with anyone who has more than one or two years of management experience, and it should resonate especially with managers in the business of publishing magazines. In my view, what are magazines if not products of process rather than products of one-time or stop-time use (as are many other consumer products)?

Yet we have put a lot of effort into marketing our magazines and managing our people as if we were in just another packaged-goods business. We have imposed upon this unique business of ours some of the old-school business disciplines that enlightened businesses are now discarding in preparation for the 21st century.