Women Born In The 1940s

"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."

"I was reading of chaos that contained order; of information as the primal, creative force; of systems that, by design, fell apart so they could renew themselves; and of invisible forces that structured space and held complex things together. These were compelling, evocative ideas, and they gave me hope, even if they did not reveal immediate solutions."

"Scott London: How did you begin to explore the connection between management and science? Meg Wheatley: I didn't have an interest in the new science. I had a realization that in my profession — which was vaguely labeled "organizational change," "organizational development," or "management consulting" in general — none of us knew how organizations change. When I talked to other consultants, I noticed that if we had an organizational change effort that was successful, it felt like a miracle to us. I realized with a great start one day that we weren't even geared up for success. It didn't matter that we didn't know how to change organizations. We were all professionals who didn't hope to achieve what we were selling or suggesting to clients. The field was really moribund. At the same time — and this is the serendipity of life — I had a friend and educator whom I had worked with for many years who said casually one day "Meg, if you're interested in systems thinking, you should be reading quantum physics." He didn't know where I was in my despair over my professional failings. But I said, "Okay, give me a book list." He gave me ten titles. I read eight of those and I was off. I always credit him with that casual, helpful comment that changed my life."

"To name is to make visible."

"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."

"Meg Wheatley was thrown into the public spotlight in 1992 with the publication of Leadership and the New Science, a groundbreaking look at how new discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology challenge our standard ways of thinking in organizations. It showed how our reliance on old, mechanistic models stand in the way of innovation and effective leadership."

"In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that."

"When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans."

"Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. It's amazing to me how much we do, but how little time we spend reflecting on what we just did."

"Over many years of work all over the world, I've learned that if we organize in the same way that the rest of life does, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life's processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings."

"There is a simpler, finer way to organize human endeavor. I have declared this for many years and seen it to be true in many places. This simpler way is demonstrated to us in daily life, not the life we see on the news with its unending stories of human grief and horror, but what we feel when we experience a sense of life's deep harmony, beauty, and power, of how we feel when we see people helping each other, when we feel creative, when we know we're making a difference, when life feels purposeful."

"What I have learned from my travels is that by listening at least as much as we speak, and by trying to understand before we act, we perhaps stand a better chance of coming up with the right answers…"

"Poetry is like time travel, and poems take us to the heart of the matter"

"As a half-resident of Wiltshire I feel very loyal to the county."

"There are lots of things I do feel strongly about, but if I speak about them I will be on my best behaviour."

"In a world where so many things have changed for the better, there are –sadly - still many vulnerable, forgotten and neglected children. Each one of them has a unique story"

"Oh, oh, very badly. I would love to start again but maybe I’m too old"

"Being a friendly neighbour has always been the keystone of community life and just saying “hello” can sometimes make a huge difference"

"Reading is exciting. Reading is fun. Reading is cool. There is nothing quite like the thrill of opening a book and being drawn into another world to meet new people and to discover their stories - it’s like making new friends"

"My grandfather, P Morton Shand, […] declared that ‘A woman who cannot make soup should not be allowed to marry’. You might not agree with his rants, but there was no doubting his passion for proper food"

"English students don't spend much time on their studies. They're more interested in partying and having fun."

"Oh, it's quite all right, we curse quite a lot around here."

"Sharron Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical... Bill Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now. Sharron Angle: Well it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems."

"Sharron Angle believes that campaign finance limitations must come from the candidates themselves."

"Sharron Angle believes that the Federal Department of Education should be eliminated. The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education, at any level."

"Sharron Angle worked to pass the Constitutional Protection of Marriage Act in Nevada, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman, and Sharron Angle supports the Federal Marriage Amendment to do the same."

"The U.N. continually threatens U.S. sovereignty, with endless rhetoric and treaties and it has now become the "umpire" on fraudulent science, such as global warming. The United State needs to withdraw from the United Nations and work solely with America's willing allies."

"Cap and Trade, which is based on an unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax, steps over the constitutional boundaries of the federal government and is merely another way to tax the people."

"For nearly twenty years, Sharron Angle has been in favor of Yucca Mountain, as a profitable center for reprocessing, not a nuclear landfill and dumping ground."

"Free market alternatives, which offer retirement choices to employees and employers, must be developed and offered to those still in their wage earning years, as the Social Security system is transitioned out."

"We need to have policies that stimulate the economy, and the economy is stimulated when business feels confident that we can put people back to work."

"Every policy that the United States government has in place needs to be a policy that creates jobs for Americans."

"Nathan Baca: You are literally staying silent about the two wars that we're in right now. Sharron Angle: You know, the two wars that we're in right now, is exactly what we're in."

"Nathan Baca: If you want to be one of 100 U.S. Senators that are deciding on war powers and on ratifying treaties, which is what a Senator has to do, you have to answer these questions. Sharron Angle: Well, certainly. And I'll answer those questions when I'm the senator."

"So that's what we want is a secure and sovereign nation, and, you know, I don't know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don't know that. What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I'm evidence of that. I've been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly."

"Q: Why is it that in all of your commercials you have the image of Latinos? What do you see when you hear, and I quote, "illegal aliens?" Sharron Angle: I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials. I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence. What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That's the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists; we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don’t know why they're coming. So we have to secure all of our borders and that's what that was about, is border security. Not just our southern border, but our coastal border and our northern border."

"My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States."

"When I said privatize, that's what I meant. That I thought we would just have to go to the private sector for a template on how this is supposed to be done. However, I've since been studying and Chile has done this."

"You know, I am mainstream America, and it really doesn't matter what party you're in. When you call your children and you say 'How are you?' - and what you are really asking is, 'Do you still have your job? And are you able to make the mortgage payment?', That resonates across the state, not across party lines."

"People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative."

"Sharron Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend. Carl Cameron: Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend…? Sharron Angle: Well, truly— Carl Cameron: That sounds naive. Sharron Angle: Well, no. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."

"But I'm a mainstreamer. I think that, you know, when we start talking about the Tea Party, people want to marginalize that into some kind of organization or party, but it really isn't."

"[in mainstream media outlets] There's no earnings for me there."

"The whole point of an interview is to … earn something with it and I'm not going to earn anything from people who are there to badger me and use my words to batter me with."

"You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn't pay as much. And so that's what's happened to us is that we have put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry and said you don't want the jobs that are available."

"Alan Stock: What do you say, then, to a young girl—I am going to place it as he said it—when a young girl is raped by her father, let's say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby? Sharron Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade."

"Government shouldn't be doing that to a private company. And I think you named it clearly: It's a slush fund."

"Jon Ralston: So you're saying if people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, as many have during this recession, Sharron Angle's solution is to cut their unemployment benefits so low so they're somehow gonna go out and find jobs that don't exist? How does that make any sense? Sharron Angle: There are jobs that do exist. That's what we're saying, is that there are jobs. But those are entry-level jobs."

"Jon Ralston: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits? Sharron Angle: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does."