Management Quotes

All inquiry, whatever its subject, has as its final object the matter of how to go about living.
— Mark Kingwell

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Life and Strategy

Knowingness is murderous of wonder and of insight, and ultimately it does a violent disservice to that which it sought to serve.
— Mark Kingwell

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Knowledge and Wisdom

There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, ‘Is it good in itself?’ In the second, ‘Can it be easily put into practice?’
— Jean Jacques Rousseau

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Analysis and Strategy

If the bureaucratic trap is like a cage that restricts the opportunities for people to contribute all they can, the entrepreneurial trap is a void, a black hole into which people disappear when they lack direction or accountability. The issue is balance: enough breadth in jobs and decentralization in decisions to allow initiative and creativity, but enough discipline and direction and controls to focus local initiative on the highest priority tasks from the standpoint of the entire corporation.
— Kanter (Rosabeth Moss?)

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Bureaucracy and Entrepreneurship

The information society is completed — it’s actually been around about 90 years. Now we’re beginning the post-information society. In Alvin Toffler’s terms, any time one of these new ‘waves’ comes in, like when the agricultural economy started giving way to the industrial economy, you have an ‘epoch of uncertainty.’ Now we’re at a point where the uncertainty may never stabilize — there is such a cascading of the amount of change with the rate of change. It isn’t just about the acceleration of the pace of change. It’s also the amount of it. The only certainty we can count on in the future will be a continuing state of uncertainty.

Every epoch has its organizing premise. When we were industrial, it was reason; when we were information, it was complexity, chaos theory, choice modeling…Now we think the new organizing premise is paradox.

So paradox becomes the organizing premise of the post-information society, just as complexity was the organizing premise of the information society. The key to paradox is that you don’t do one or the other of those approaches; you do both.
— Watts Wacker

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Future and History

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Action and Criticism

Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.
— Tom Kelley and Christopher Littman

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Planning and Preparation

Learning has to do with integrating information into your own internal framework so you own it within your own conceptual space. That means you have to engage in some kind of action with the knowledge being transferred to you.
— John Seely Brown

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Knowledge and Learning

There’s nothing magical about the United States, in my opinion, except its ability to innovate and innovate freely, and that’s what this country’s all about.
— Brian Arthur

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Economics and International

You can’t let the new revolution fall into the hands of the people who ran the last revolution. That’s a legal disaster and it’s an economic disaster.
— Brian Arthur

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Miscellaneous