“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.”
_____________________
“Not surprisingly, most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. This is
the mother of all management orthodoxies.”
_____________________
“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.”
_____________________
“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.”
_____________________
“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.”
_____________________
“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.”
_____________________
“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.”