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.
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."
April 5 - 12
"The corporation's
strange attractor - the component that permits change within constrained
limits - is its values system."
March 23 - 29
"We'll have to be
smart enough to figure out how nature would design a company if nature had
a chance."
March 15 - 22
"Self-organization
is a universal property of life,
creating order in everything from zebra stripes
to human brains."
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."
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)
1. Thoughts
