Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

Wheatley’s line lands like a rebuke to two managerial reflexes that usually masquerade as “leadership”: clinging and blitzing. The first is the soft violence of nostalgia - keeping programs staffed and funded long after they’ve stopped doing real work, not because they serve anyone, but because letting go would force uncomfortable admissions about sunk costs, politics, or identity. The second is the hard violence of the “organizational air strike,” a chilling metaphor that frames restructuring as remote-control warfare: executives at altitude, casualties on the ground, collateral damage written off as “efficiency.”

Her intent is to puncture the false moral hierarchy between these approaches. One looks compassionate (we’re loyal; we’re stable), the other looks decisive (we’re bold; we’re serious). Wheatley argues they’re comparably harmful because both avoid the same thing: attending to living systems in real time. Holding on starves new growth; indiscriminate destruction poisons the soil.

The subtext is ecological, even spiritual, but aimed squarely at modern institutions that treat change as either denial or spectacle. “Natural life span” suggests that organizations, like organisms, have seasons. The question isn’t whether something ends; it’s whether leaders can recognize when ending is appropriate and do it with intimacy, not distance.

Context matters: Wheatley’s broader work critiques mechanistic, command-and-control models and borrows from complexity and systems thinking. Her closing sentence draws a boundary against change-as-first-resort theater. Destruction, she insists, should be composting - the final stage of a cycle - not a headline-grabbing opening move.