Gallery
of enlightened quotes - Archive
September 11 - September 18
"Scientific knowledge, originally seen
to make possible the prediction and manipulation of nature, appears
now to be pointing us toward a new relationship with the natural world
based on sensitive observation and participation, rather than control."
--Brian Goodwin
September 4 - September 11
"Fasten your seat belts, the turbulence
has scarcely begun. Unless evolution has radically changed its ways,
we are facing an explosion of societal diversity and complexity hundreds
of times greater than we now experience or can yet imagine. If we
think to perpetuate the old ways, we should try to recall the last
time evolution rang our number and asked consent."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic
Age
August 28 - September 4
"If you have built castles in
the air your work need not be lost: that is where they should be.
Now put the foundation under them."
--Henry David Thoreau
August 21- August 28
"If you have built castles in
the air your work need not be lost: that is where they should be.
Now put the foundation under them."
--Henry David Thoreau
August 14 - August 21
"Good jazz players, when they hear
a surprise, don't ask, what did you intend to do? They act on what
they heard and they create."
--Reuben McDaniel
August 7- August 14
"A society that relies on generalized
reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the
same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Trust lubricates
social life. Networks of civic engagement also facilitate coordination
and communication and amplify information about the trustworthiness
of other individuals."
--Robert D. Putnam
July 31- August 7
"Life will never surrender its
secrets to a yardstick."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic
Age
July 24- July 31
"Great ideas come into the world
as quietly as doves. Perhaps then , if we listen attentively we shall
hear, among the uproar of empires and nations, the faint fluttering
of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Some will say this
hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is
awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose
deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications
of history. Each and every one, on the foundations of their own suffering
and joy builds for all."
--Albert Camus
July 17 - July 24
"In an unknowable world, sensemaking
is not a matter of doing the best we can because we are stupid; rather
it is the best we can do because we are smart."
--Reuben
McDaniel
July 10 - July 17
"These communities did not become civic
simply because they were rich. The historical record strongly suggests
precisely the opposite: They have become rich because they were civic.
The social capital embodied in norms and networks of civic engagement
seems to be a precondition for economic development, as well as for
effective government. Development economists take note: Civics matters.
How does social capital undergird good government and economic progress?
First, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized
reciprocity…"
--Robert
D. Putnam
July 3 - July
10
"Go to the ant,
thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise; For though she has
no chief, no commander or ruler, She procures her food in the summer,
stores up her provisions in the harvest."
--Proverbs VI, 6
June 26 - July
3
"Given the power and ubiquity
of thes human tendencies toward inertia, dualism, linearity, and reduction,
it can be no surprise that the scientific establishment rewards those
who color within the lines. It can also be no shock to realize that
all useful advance must come from deviation outside of those lines.
Thinking new thoughts is, after all, impossible for most, difficult
for all, frightening for many–and irresistible for some few poor
souls. This is dangerous in science and can be deadly in medicine."
--William J.M. Hrushesky, "Triumph
of the Trivial"
June 19 - June 26
"Is anyone afraid of change? Why,
what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing to
the universal nature? And canst thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes
a change? And canst thou be nourished unless the food undergoes a
change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without
change? Dost thou not see then that for thyself also to undergo change
is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?"
--Marcus Aurelius Antonius
June 12 - June 19
"I want to stay as close to the
edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds
of things you can't see from the center."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
June 5 - June 12
"The last word in ignorance is
the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘what good is
it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part
is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the
course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand,
then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep
every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent
tinkering."
--Aldo Leopold "Round
River," A Sand County Almanac, 190.
May 29 - June 5
"Particularity and separability
are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics of the
universe."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic
Age
May 22 - May 29
"Over-socialization increases
the probability that people will change to fit the organization
rather than that people will change the organization so that it can
cope with developing situations."
–J.G. March, Organization
Science
May 15 - May 22
"The manager's task is not to
know what is going on and then tell others in the organization what
to do. Rather, the manager's task is to create an organizational
environment in which learning is highly valued and in which people
listen to and respect insights and understandings that are
different than their own."
–Reuben R. McDaniel, Jr. &
Michelle E. Walls, Journal of Management Inquiry
May 8 - May 15
"To see a World in a grain of
Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour."
--William Blake
May 1 - May 8
"The goal of science is to build better
mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better
mice."
--Anonymous
April 24 - May 1
"Prediction is difficult, especially
of the future."
--Mark Twain (also attributed to Niels
Bohr)
April 17 - April 24
"The universe is full of magical
things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
--Eden Phillpots
April 10 - April 17
"Clouds are not spheres, mountains
are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth,
nor does lightning travel in a straight line."
--Benoit Mandelbrot
April 3 - April 10
"Fasten your seat belts, the turbulence
has scarcely begun. Unless evolution has radically changed its ways,
we are facing an explosion of societal diversity and complexity hundreds
of times greater than we now experience or can yet imagine. If we
think to perpetuate the old ways, we should try to recall the last
time evolution rang our number and asked consent."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age
March 27 - April 3
""Explicit knowledge is that
knowledge that is written down or in a knowledge base. Tacit
knowledge is that knowledge that is in the heads of the people.
The greatest knowledge base in the company is the tacit knowledge
in the heads of the people that is continually changing and
evolving."
--Robert Buckman, CEO, Buckman Labs
March 20 - March 27
"Great ideas come into the world
as quietly as doves. Perhaps then , if we listen attentively we shall
hear, among the uproar of empires and nations, the faint fluttering
of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Some will say this
hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is
awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose
deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications
of history. Each and every one, on the foundations of their own suffering
and joy builds for all."
--Albert Camus
March 13 - March 20
"Life will never surrender its
secrets to a yardstick."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic
Age
March 6 - March 13
"Given the power and ubiquity
of thes human tendencies toward inertia, dualism, linearity, and reduction,
it can be no surprise that the scientific establishment rewards those
who color within the lines. It can also be no shock to realize that
all useful advance must come from deviation outside of those lines.
Thinking new thoughts is, after all, impossible for most, difficult
for all, frightening for many-and irresistible for some few poor souls.
This is dangerous in science and can be deadly in medicine."
--William J.M. Hrushesky, "Triumph
of the Trivial"
February 21 - February 28
"The last word in ignorance is the man who says
of an animal or plant: 'what good is it?' If the land mechanism as
a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it
or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we
like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly
useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution
of intelligent tinkering."
--Aldo Leopold "Round River," A Sand County
Almanac, 190.
February
14 - February 21
"Fractal Geometry will make you see everything
differently. There is danger in reading further. You risk the
loss of your childhood vision of clouds, forests, flowers, galaxies,
leaves, feathers, rocks, mountains, torrents of water, carpets,
bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpretation
of these things be the same.
--Michael F. Barnsley
February 7 - February 14
"Particularity and separability
are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics
of the universe."
--Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age
January 31 - February 7
"Things should be as simple as possible,
but not simpler." --Albert Einstein
January 3
- 10
"Diversity stregthens organizational learning
and thereby enables organizations to function, even in the
face of the unknowabilities that is their reality."
–Reuben R. McDaniel, Jr. & Michelle
E. Walls,
Journal of Management Inquiry
December 27 - January
3
"’There are some great conductors, just
like there are some great CEO’s,’ says Julian Fifer,
founder and president of the New York-based chamber ensemble,
‘but, as a breed, neither conductors nor CEO’s have
a monopoly on talent.’"
–James Traub, The New Yorker
December 20 - 27
"Playing music without a conductor is a good
way to develop the antennae and smarts to be attuned to things
outside a two-foot sphere around your head. The best orchestras
have alwayst been those where the musicians are laterally
engaged with other members of the orchestra. At Orpheus, that’s
all we have – that attentiveness to others."
–James Traub, The New Yorker
December 13 - 20
"A door like this has cracked open five or
six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the
best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you
thought you knew is wrong."
–Tom Stoppard
December 6 - 13
"As humans we are complex and chaotic
when healthy
and rigidly orderly when ill."
–Stuart Davidson
November
29 - December 6
"When the world is predictable
you need smart people.
When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people."
–Henry Mintzberg
November
22 - 29
"Butterfly power allows
for the impossible. Rosa Parks may have thought it was inconceivable
that her small action could be central to changing the long-entrenched
Jim Crow system. Nevertheless, her own authentic action provided
the trigger that allowed many ordinary people to act in the
truth of the moment, transforming the consciousness of an entire
nation."
–Seven
Life Lessons of Chaos
John Briggs
and F. David Peat
November
15 - 22
"The social sum
total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when
added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world
than do rare heroic feats."–A
Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil
November
8 - 15
"Chaos theory
tells us that when life seems to be the most complicated,
a simple order may be just around the corner."
–Seven
Life Lessons of Chaos
John Briggs and F. David Peat
November 1 - 8
"Lo! Men have become tools
of their tools."
–Henry
David Thoreau
October
25 - November 1
"Even as it was toppled from unassailability
in science, Newtonian mechanics remained firmly lodged as the mental
model of management, from the first stirrings of the industrial
revolution right through the advent of modern-day M.B.A. studies."
–Tom Petzinger, Wall Street
Journal
October
18 - 25
"The behaviour of people is not driven
by unchanging rules.
The ‘rules’, if that is what they are, change as people learn."
–Ralph Stacey, Strategic Management
and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity
October
11 - 18
"I think we all want to honor and acknowledge
the many great accomplishments of past cultures the world over, and
attempt to retain and incorporate as much of their wisdom as we can.
But the train, for better or worse, is in motion, and has been from
day one, and trying to drive by looking only in the rearview mirror
is likely to cause even worse accidents."
–Ken Wilber, A Brief History
of Everything
October
4 - 11
"If we look at the various fields of
human knowledge—from physics to biology to psychology, sociology,
theology, and religion—certain broad, general themes emerge,
about which there is actually very little disagreement…My point
is that if we take these types of largely-agreed-upon orienting generalizations
from the various branches of knowledge—from physics to biology
to psychology to theology—and if we string these orienting generalizations
together, we will arrive at some astonishing and often profound conclusions,
conclusions that, as extraordinary as they might be, nonetheless embody
nothing more than our already-agreed-upon knowledge. The beads of
knowledge are already accepted: it is only necessary to string them
together into a necklace."
–Ken Wilber, A Brief History
of Everything
September
27 - October 4
"(Evolution) is always struggling to
establish new limits, and then struggling just as hard to break them,
to transcend them, to move beyond them into more encompassing and
integrative and holistic modes."
–Ken Wilber, A Brief History
of Everything
September
20 - 27
...(N)o matter
how visionary or smart or forward-looking or aggressive (one) brain
might be, it is no match for conditions of interactive complexity.
K.E. Weick & K.H. Roberts,
Administrative Science Quarterly
September
13 - 20
People were
talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as
if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A
theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the
very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized
stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about--clouds,
daffodils, waterfalls, and what happens in a cup of coffee when the
cream goes in--these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to
us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events
at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether
it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard,
Arcadia
September
6 - 13
If the response to uncertainty is to
stay at home then the options opened up by journeying forth will never
be available.
Ralph D. Stacey
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity
August
30 - September 6
No perfection is so absolute that some
impunity doth not pollute.
William Shakespeare
August
23 - 30
The resiliency of any complex adaptive
system is embodied in its diversity and in the capacity for adaptive
change among system components.
Simon A. Levin
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
August
16 - 23
Natural systems are highly nonlinear,
and what we observe in any environment is in part the result of accidents
of history and of the influence of emigrants from neighboring ecosystems.
Simon A. Levin
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
August
9 - 16
To manage the Earth's systems and ensure
our survival, we have to harness the natural forces that organize
the biosphere rather than fruitlessly trying to resist them.
Simon A. Levin
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
August
2 - 9
The central environmental challenge
of our time is embodied in the staggering losses, both recent and
projected, of biological diversity at all levels, from the smallest
organisms to charismatic large animals and towering trees.
Simon A. Levin
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
July 26
- August 2
Biological diversity is not just a
source of aesthetic pleasure for Homo sapiens - it is the reason for
our being.
Simon A. Levin
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
July 19
- 26
We need to think less like managers
and more like biologists.
Ralph D. Stacey
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity (forthcoming, Fall
1999)
July 12
- 19
If the response to uncertainty is to
stay at home then the options opened up by journeying forth will never
be available.
Ralph D. Stacey
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity (forthcoming, Fall
1999)
July 5
- 12
I am suggesting, then, that in moving
from the position of manager as objective observer to that of manager
as inquiring participant, attention is focused on the unexpected responses
of organisational members to managers' intentions. Intention is understood
as emergent and problematic. The emphasis shifts from the manager
focusing on how to make a choice to focusing on the quality of participation
in self-organising conversations from which such choices and the responses
to them emerge.
Ralph D. Stacey
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity (forthcoming, Fall
1999)
June 28
- July 5
If one takes this perspective, that
an organisation is a pattern of talk, then, an organisation changes
only insofar as its conversational life evolves. Organisational change
is the same thing as change in the pattern of talk and therefore the
pattern of power relations. Creativity, novelty and innovation are
all the emergence of new patterns of talk and patterns of power relations...Change
is possible when conversational life is free flowing and flexible
and impossible when conversational life remains stuck in repetitive
themes.
Ralph D. Stacey
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics:
The Challenge of Complexity (forthcoming, Fall
1999)
June 21
- 28
With Newtonianism
crumbling as a mental model, thinkers began looking elsewhere. Across
the sciences researchers discovered a world of kaleidoscopic
complexity and unpredictability, triggering fundamental revisions.
The story of the physical sciences in the twentieth century, no differently
than the story of art, literature, and music, is one of qualities
taking their place alongside quantities, relationships taking their
place with objects, ambiguity taking its place with order.
Thomas Petzinger,
Jr
in The New
Pioneers
June 14
- 21
Perhaps treating
companies like machines keeps them from changing, or makes changing
them much more difficult. We keep bringing in mechanics -- when what
we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change -- when what
we
need to do is cultivate change. Surprisingly, this mechanical mind-set
can afflict those who seek "humane" changes through learning
organizations" just as much as it can afflict those who drive
more traditional changes, such as mergers and reorganizations.
Peter Senge,
from the May 1999 issue of Fast Company
June 7
- 14
After a time of decay comes a turning point. The powerful
light that has been banished returns. There is movement,
but it is not brought on by force...the movement is natural,
arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of
the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new
is introduced. Both measures accord with the time,
therefore no harm results.
I Ching
May 31
- June 7
We need to think less like managers and more like
biologists.
Peter Senge, from the May 1999 issue of Fast Company
May 24
- 31
Deep change comes only through
real personal growth - through learning and unlearning. This is the
kind of generative work that most executives are precluded from doing
by the mechanical mind-set and by the cult of the hero-leader: The hero-leader
is the one with "the answers." Most of the other people in
the organization can't make deep changes, because they're operating
out of compliance, rather than commitment. Commitment comes about only
when people determine what they really care about. For that reason,
if you create compliance-oriented change, you'll get change - but you'll
preclude the deeper processes that lead to commitment, and you'll prevent
the emergence of self-generated change.
Peter Senge, from the May 1999 issue
of Fast Company
May
17- 24
I have never seen a successful organizational-learning
program rolled out from the top. Not a single one. Conversely, every
change process that I've seen that was sustained and that spread
has started small.
Peter Senge, from the May 1999 issue of Fast Company
May 10
- 17
Businesses that fail to engage the eyes,
ears, minds,
and emoticons of every individual in the organization will find
themselves overrun by obsolescence or crushed by competition.
Thomas
Petzinger, Jr
in The New
Pioneers
May 3-
10
Utopia is a paradoxical concept. As a motivating
idea - improvement is desirable - we can't do without it. But every
time we try to implement it on a grand schale, we accomplish its
disastrous opposite. Perhaps that is why the word itself means "no
place."
Margaret Atwood, from article God Is In The Details,
The New York Times Magazine
April
12 - 19
"We know
the capacity to self-organize is inborn in humans because it is
a skill we display when forced to act on instinct: during an emergency,
as when rivers crest or hurricanes approach."
from Thomas Petzinger, Jr
in The
New Pioneers
April
5 - 12
March
23 - 29
March
15 - 22
March
8 - 15
"Good managers and good enterprises and good
products and good communities and good
states are all conditions of one another."
Abraham Maslow,
Eupsychian Management
March
1 - 8
"Evolution's arrow has endowed us with the
skills
to take the measure of our surroundings, to collaborate with our
colleagues, and, through countless parallel acts, to cause our organizations
to adapt, all without central planning or control."
Thomas
Petzinger
The New Pioneers
February
22 - March 1
"Very little of importance is ever just the
sum of its parts,
except money."
Tyler Volk, Metapatterns
February
15 - 22
"The motion of a flock of birds
is...simple in concept yet is so visually complex it seems randomly
arrayed and yet is magnificently synchronous. Perhaps most puzzling
is the strong impression of intentional centralized control. Yet all
evidence indicates that flock motion must be merely the aggregate
result of the actions of individual animals, each acting solely on
the basis of its local perception
of the world."
Craig
Reynolds
In 1986 Craig Reynolds created a computer model of coordinated animal
motion such a bird flocks and fish schools. He called the software
boids. This simulation has become well-known in complexity for its
graphic illustration of the principle that complex behavior emerges
from simple rules. Boids is an example of individual-based model,
a class of simulation used to capture the global behavior of la
large number of interacting autonomous agents.
February
8 - 15
"Evolution's
arrow has endowed us with the skills to take the measure of our surroundings,
to collaborate with our colleagues, and, through countless parallel
acts, to cause our organizations to adapt, all without central planning
or control."
Thomas Petzinger
The New Pioneers
February
1 - 8
"A door
like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our
hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything
you thought you knew is wrong."
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
January
25 - February 1
"The new
pioneers celebrate individuality over conformity among their employees
and customers alike. They deploy technology to distribute rather than
consolidate authority and creativity. They compete through resilience
instead of resistance, through adaptation instead of control. In times
of dizzying complexity and change, they realize that tightly drawn
strategies become brittle while shared purpose endures."
Thomas Petzinger
The New Pioneers
January
11 - 18
"Clearly
leadership has to do with the sustaining of creative tension in organizations.
Creative tension is derived through strategic imbalance, which occurs
when operating at the limits of organizational consensus or the boundaries
of the organization. Innovation takes place on the edges of the organization
where the potential for far-from-equilibrium conditions is optimal."
Brenda Zimmerman
January
4 - 11
"...the task is not so much to see
what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about
that which everybody sees."
Arthur Schopenhauer
December
21 - January 4
"Getting a new idea adopted, even
when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult. Many
innovations require a lengthy period, often of many years, from the
time they become available to the time they are widely adopted.
Therefore, a common problem for many individuals and organizations is
how to speed up the rate of diffusion of innovation."
Everett Rogers
Diffusion of Innovations, 4th edition
November
29 - December 6
"The story of the physical sciences
in the twentieth cnetury, no differently than the story of art, literature,
and music, is one of qualities taking their place alongside quantities,
relationships taking their place with objects, ambiguity taking its
place with order.
Except in business. Business (and government, the business of state)
slept through every minute of the postmodern awakening. Even as it was
toppled from unassailability in science, Newtonian mechanics remained
firmly lodged as the mental model of management, from the first stirrings
of the industiral revolution right through the advent of modern-day
M.B.A. studies."
Thomas Petzinger, Jr.,
The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace
and Marketplace
(forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, March, 1999)
November
22 - 29
"Bad times have a scientific value.
These are
the occasions a good learner would not miss."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
November15
- 22
"The tendancy of people in positions
of power is to believe that they can control and they believe in the
power of 'let us figure it out.' 'Let's hire the experts, let us sit
in a room, figure it out and then it'll happen.' That is a common theme
and it's one that I just don't believe in"
James Taylor
President and CEO, University of Louisville Hospital
Louisville, Kentucky
November
8 - 15
"Consciousness is the virtual world
composed by the scenarios. There is not even a Cartesian theater, to
use Daniel Dennett’s dismissive phrase, no single locus of the
brain where the scenarios are played out in coherent form. Instead,
there are interlacing patterns of neutral activity within and among
particular sites throughout the forebrain, from cerebral cortex to other
specialized centers of cognition such as the thalamus, amygdala, and
hippocampus. There is no single steam of consciousness in which all
information is brought together by the executive ego. There are instead
multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to
conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled
aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing
republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear,
and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought
and physical activity."
Edward O. Wilson
November
1 - 8
"Life is a web of interactive particles
of which humankind and nature are coequal partners."
Aboriginal saying
courtesy of Roger Lewin and Birute Regine
October
26 - November 1
"What’s the weather gonna do?
is a question asked by ninnies. The answer to this question is obvious.
It’ll do what it damn well pleases when it pleases………
It has better things to do. Storms to brew, winds to whirl, that sort
of thing. Not that the weather doesn’t occasionally listen in.
It eavesdrops on the millions of forecasts transmitted daily and in
a low, hearty rumble, laughs."
Nike Advertisement
Eco Traveler Magazine
October
19 - 25
"We must draw our standards from
the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds
of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting
that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds
all our competence."
Vaclav Havel
President of the Czech Republic
September
28-October 4
"Every truth passes through three
stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the
second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident."
Marianne Williamson
Illuminata
September 21-27
"At its heart, competing on the
edge meets the strategic challenge of change by constantly reshaping
competitive advantage even as the marketplace unpredictably and rapidly
shifts. The goal is reinvention through a relentless flow of competitive
advantages. In terms of strategy, competing on the edge ties "Where
do you want to go?" intimately to "How are you going to get
there?" The result is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and even inefficient
strategy that nonetheless....works."
Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt
Competing on the Edge
September 14-20
"Our imagination is stretched
to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really
there, but just to comprehend those things which are
there."
Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
August 31-September 6
I have suggested
that we model our organizational strategies on those of nature. But
nature, though an obliging guide, is not so easily followed. Indeed,
she seems to be filled with conflicts that might cause you to question
her integrity. Put her on the witness stand and ask, "Do you believe
in cooperation?" and she says, "Yes." "Do you believe
in competition?" "Yes." "Do you believe in disruption?"
"Yes." "Do you support equilibrium?" "Yes."
Obviously this is testimony riddled with contradictions. But there is
one more question to ask, "Do you believe in paradox?" The
answer is emphatically "Yes!"
J. Daniel Beckham
Organic Strategy and the Cellular Organization: Embracing Paradox
August 24-30
"...And it
is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most
of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and
desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the
attempt to say man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably
to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say,
but a profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a Roger
Bacon, a Charles Darwin, an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo
and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the
knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--a
plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets
and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string
of time. "
John Steinbeck
Log from the Sea of Cortez
August 17 - 23
"The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome
contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute
of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search
for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern
science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute
truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe
to human exploration. It was only by being provisional and open to change,
even radical change, that scientific knowledge
began to evolve. And ironically, its vulnerability to change is the
source of its strength."
Heinz R. Pagel
Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of
Time
August
10 - 16
"In his Scientific
Management Theory, Frederic Taylor described employees as 'passive units
of production.' "
Danah Zohar
Rewiring The Corporate Brain, 1997
August
3 - 9
"...fragmentation
is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each
individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the
mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with
our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able
to solve most of them...The notion that all these fragments are separately
existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other
than lead to endless confusion and conflict. "
David Bohm
Book: Science, Order and Creativity, 1987
July 20
- 26
"Ethics is
how we behave when we decide we belong together. "
D. Steindl-Rast
(c/o Dr. Kathryn Reed)
July 13 - 19
"To infuse
psychology and biology into economic and other social theory, which
can only be to its advantage, means teasing out and examining microscopically
the delicate concepts of utility, by asking why people ultimately lean
toward certain choices, and being so predisposed, why and under what
circumstances they act on them. Beyond this task lies the micro-to-macro
problem, the ensemble of processes by which the mass of individual decisions
are translated into social patterns. Beyond that, framed by a still
wider scale of space and time, is the coevolution problem, the means
by which biological evolution inlfuences culture, and the reverse. Together
these domains - human nature, micro-to-macro transition, and the coevolution
of genes and culture - require the full traverse from the social sciences
to psychology and thence to brain sciences and genetics."
E.O. Wilson,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
July 6 - July
12
"I don't
program contemporary works with a deeply serious sense of responsibility,
but as something....that is exciting and expands your conception of
what music can be. So when you come back to the traditional pieces,
you play them in a way that presents something new about the piece,
or at least reaffirms the sense of wonder the music had when it was
first heard."
from Competing on the Edge
Michael Tilson Thomas
Music Director, San Francisco Symphony
June 29 - July
5
"We are at
that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another
is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society,
and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced.
Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty,
community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony
with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such
as the world has never dreamed."
Dee Hock
June 22-28
"Complexity
is a curious thing...It is mind expanding because of new notions, but
it also it is also affirming of the stuff you already know. It is quite
paradoxical."
James Roberts, MD, VHA Inc.
June 15-21
"With the
intergration of finance and medicine, along with hospital mergers and
consolidations, health care has become one of the most complex industries
imaginable...Complexity theory is at the forefront of how we're going
to manage in the future."
Richard Hastings, St. Luke's Shawnee Mission Health System
June 8-14
"Businesses
- in fact, organizations of all kinds - are starting to abandon the
most time-warn priniciples of control in favor of a new way: freeing
employees to figure out how to get the job done without central planning
or control. Self-organization, some call it."
Thomas Petzinger, The Wall Street Journal
June 1-7
"Complexity
theory talks about interactions among agents leading to unpredictable
properties. In business we must recognize that the agents are people
- real people- who have hopes and fear, who hurt and who love. We must
recognize that you have to attend to relationships, because they are
the rich interaction from which emergence happens. And we must recognize
that emergence will happen, even though we don't know precisely what
it will be or how we will get there."
Roger Lewin - 1998 VHA Leadership Conference
May 25-May
31
"With the
intergration of finance and medicine, along with hospital mergers and
consolidations, health care has become one of the most complex industries
imaginable...Complexity theory is at the forefront of how we're going
to manage in the future."
Richard Hastings,
St. Luke's Shawnee Mission Health System
May 11-May17
"Fasten
your seat belts, the turbulence has scarcely begun. Unless evolution
has radically changed its ways, we are faced with an explosion of
societal diversity and complexity incomparably greater than we have
ever experienced or are yet able to comprehend. If you think to perpetuate
the old ways, try to recall the last time evolution rang your number
and asked your consent."
Dee Hock - 1997 VHA Leadership Conference
May 4-May
10
"If you do
not rest upon the good foundation of nature, you will labor with little
honour and less profit. Those who take for their standard anyone but
nature - the mistress of all masters - weary themselves in vain."
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
April
27-May 3
"The real
voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
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