“My guess is that the most bruising skirmishes in the new millennium won’t be fought along the battle lines that separate one competitor, ecosystem or economic bloc from another. Rather, they will be fought along the lines that separate those who seek to defend the prerogatives, power and prestige of their bureaucratic caste from those who hope to build less structured, less tightly managed organizations that elicit and merit the very best that human beings have to give.”
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“Not surprisingly, most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. This is the mother of all management orthodoxies.”
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“To a large extent, managers play the role of parents, school principles, crossing guards and hall monitors. They employ control from without because employees have been deprived of the ability to exercise control from within. Adolescents outgrow most of these constraining influences; employees often aren’t given that chance. The result: disaffection. Adults enjoy being treated like 13-year olds even less than 13-year olds.”
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“New problems demand new principles. Put bluntly, there’s simply no way to build tomorrow’s essential organizational capabilities—resilience, innovation and employee engagement—atop the scaffolding of 20th century management principles.”
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“Have you ever asked yourself, what are the deepest principles upon which my management beliefs are based? Probably not. Few executives, in my experience, have given much thought to the foundational principles that underlie their views on how to organize and manage. In that sense, they are as unaware of their managerial DNA as they are of their biological DNA.”
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“One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularize the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Increasingly, though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits.”
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“Look around you; what things have demonstrated their adaptability across decades, centuries and eons? What sets the benchmark for adaptability? From my vantage point, life, markets, democracies, faith and cities all seem surprisingly adaptable. Each of these biological and human systems has proven itself to be far more resilient than any large corporation. They must become the role models for 21st century companies.”