Success Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

“Destroying” lands here as a deliberate provocation: Wheatley grabs a word we’re trained to fear and rebrands it as a life-sustaining skill. The intent isn’t nihilism; it’s permission. In organizational and personal life, we cling to systems long after they stop working because maintenance feels virtuous and endings feel like failure. Wheatley flips that moral math. If something has “lost [its] effectiveness,” keeping it alive becomes the real sabotage.

The subtext is a critique of modern managerial culture: the fetish for optimization, continuous improvement, and “change” that never actually changes the underlying structure. Calling destruction “necessary” rejects the idea that decline is an exception to be patched. It frames decay as information. When a process, relationship, policy, or belief stops serving its purpose, the ethical act may be to end it cleanly rather than resuscitate it with slogans.

Her phrasing leans on seasonal language to smuggle in emotional truth. “Everything has its season” evokes nature’s unsentimental cycles, making obsolescence feel less like tragedy and more like ecology. The line “eventually lose their effectiveness and die” is blunt on purpose: she refuses the comforting euphemisms we use to avoid endings. It’s not “sunset,” it’s death.

Context matters: Wheatley’s work sits in the world of leadership and systems thinking, where collapse can be generative. She’s arguing for leaders who can compost: letting outdated structures decompose so new ones can take root, instead of building museums of past success and calling them strategy.