NONFICTION - Jan. 3, 1993

LEADERSHIP AND THE NEW SCIENCE: Learning About Organization From an Orderly Universe by Margaret J. Wheatley (Berrett/Koehler Publishers, 155 Montgomery St., San Francisco, CA 94101-4109: $22.95; 164 pp.). “This book is the future!” exclaimed the successful if immodest author who called the Book Review to put in a good word for “Leadership and the New Science,” “and now that friends of mine like Al Gore are on their way to Washington, the future may be now.”

If this book is to be any judge, however, the future will look uncannily like the past. While purporting to be science, divining truths about human society from revolutionary new discoveries in physics and biology, “Leadership and the New Science” is more like astrology, imparting mythological meanings to nature in an attempt to bring meaning to our workaday trials and tribulations.

This is not to say that Wheatley, a Harvard-trained management professor at Brigham Young University, doesn’t pinpoint modern office frustrations with lucidity and verve. “Why do so many organizations feel dead?” she asks. “Why do projects take so long, develop ever-greater complexity, yet so often fail to achieve any truly significant results? Why does progress, when it appears, so often come from unexpected places, or as a result of surprises or serendipitous events that our planning had not considered? . . . Many of the organizations I experience are impressive fortresses. . . . Some have rigid chains of command to keep people from talking to anyone outside their department; and in most companies, protocols define who can be consulted, advised, or criticized. We are afraid of what would happen if we let these elements of the organization recombine, reconfigure, or speak truthfully to one another. We are afraid that things will fall apart.”

In fact, things should come together nicely if we just leave them to their own devices, Wheatley writes. There is concord in nature, she argues, pointing to the Gaia Hypothesis, which teaches that the Earth is a single organism, and to quantum physics’ notion that particles “exist” only in relation to other particles. If we allowed this natural order to express itself in the office, employees would be freed from narrowly focused committee work, rigid chains of command would be broken and social roles would no longer be segmented, as in the ethic, “love is for home, discipline for work.”

The problem with all this is that Wheatley, while haughtily comparing herself to “Heisenberg . . . walking the streets at dawn, begging for new insights into the universe,” all but confesses that her understanding of the “new science” is at best superficial. She admits to failing chemistry at college and to lugging astronomy texts to class that “were far too dense for me to understand, but I carried them anyway because they looked so impressive.” As a result, she is unable to conjure up any specific wisdom about how to solve the problems sure to crop up when office workers abandon fuddy-duddy Newtonian ideas such as discipline, focus and division of labor. Tellingly, for example, she has no reply to the manager who says, “I believe in fully autonomous work, as long as it stops at the level below me.”