Kindle Notes & Highlights
we [have] found that across the Northern Hemisphere, average corporate life expectancy [is] well below 20 years. (53)
Resistance to adopting a new pattern of thought is widespread; most people treat their knowledge of the old pattern as an investment that has not yet been fully exploited.
The performance of a system depends on how its parts interact, not on how they act taken separately.
Most business schools teach each of the functions of a corporation separately—production, marketing, finance, personnel, and so on—and never or inadequately deal with the way they interact.
The fact is that it is not a health care system. Its servers are compensated for taking care of sickness and disabilities; it is a sickness-and-disability-care system.
Perhaps the most costly disassembly in which our culture has been engaged is the disaggregation of life itself into work, play, learning, and inspiration. Each of these aspects of life has been separated from the others by creating institutions for engaging in only one at a time, excluding the other three as much as possible. Businesses are designed for work, not play, learning, or inspiration.
chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, political, and ethical. In business schools, problems are placed in such categories as financial, personnel, public relations, production, marketing, distribution, and purchasing. However, the world is not organized like universities, colleges, and schools, by disciplines. Disciplinary categories reveal nothing about either the nature of the problems placed in them or the best way to deal with them, but they do tell us something about
selected. The best way often involves collaboration of multiple points of view. Unfortunately, universities and colleges discourage interactions between disciplinary departments, and they frequently penalize faculty members who try to interact. Students get a message from this that is both strong and wrong. Corporations do much the same thing when they create “silos” that are difficult to penetrate and to make interact.
Nevertheless, there have been and are situations in which application of deterministic or animate models to social systems have produced useful results, but these situations are often short lived. In the long run, such mismatches produce less than desirable results because critical aspects of the social system are omitted in the less complex models that are used.
Decentralizing control became necessary, and this was incompatible with a mechanistic conception of organization.
organizations frequently oscillate between centralization and decentralization.
bureaucracies, and autocratic corporations closely approximated the behavior of robots.
The principal purpose of an enterprise conceptualized as an animate system—as an organism—is, of course, survival. Growth is normally taken as essential for survival because the limit of its opposite, contraction, is death. Profit is seen in this context not as an end, but as a means: as Peter Drucker once observed, as oxygen is to a human being, necessary for its survival, but not the reason for it.
subsequently had to privatize them in order to produce more wealth. Therefore, from society’s point of view the production and maintenance of productive employment is a primary responsibility of private enterprises. In light of this, the currently widespread use of downsizing raises
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. —Peter Drucker
Subsidized organizations have such independence; they depend on a higher authority for operating funds, not on the users of their products or services. Therefore, they tend to provide poor service and products and, in general, to be unresponsive to their users.
Change makes experience obsolete; for example, the fact that one has driven an automobile for many years does not equip him or her to pilot a plane or a space vehicle.
It should be apparent in light of the preceding discussion that the most important product in planning is process. Engaging in the process develops the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that make it possible for the organization to work better. The learning that can occur through planning is greater than can be obtained in any other way within the organization.
In the course of planning, it is very important for an organization to learn and face the truth about itself.
A mission statement should contain a formulation of the organization’s ideals and do so in a way that makes possible evaluation of progress toward them.
A mission statement should define the business that the organization wants to be in, not necessarily what it is in.
General (7) 1.1. The organization should provide for learning and adaptation through an on-going planning process together with flexibility in functions, workforce training, products, and markets. 2. Organization (3) 2.1. The organizational design should be flat and as decentralized as possible, recognizing that solutions are best generated at the
lowest possible level: where the knowledge exists. 3. Management Style (1) 3.1. Management style should be interactive and should value and encourage minimum rules and policies; strategic vs. tactical orientation; employee involvement, trust, creativity, and win-win solutions; constructive feedback; etc. (10) 4. People (7) 4.1. Opportunities should be provided for employee development and experience to enhance self-worth and self-actualization while accomplishing the objectives of the organization. 5. Products (5) 5.1. The products and services should incorporate state-of-the-art technology.
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Identification of self-imposed constraints is difficult because we are generally unaware of them. However, there are ways of avoiding them or raising them to consciousness. Among such creativity-enhancing procedures are lateral thinking, brainstorming, synectics, TKJ, conceptual block busting, and idealized redesign, which I believe is the most effective.
Experts, however, can seldom think out of the box. Most major innovations in systems come from nonexperts.
Killing an opponent or enemy is an extreme way of removing him or her from the environment. (Note: the way conflict is eliminated may not be a good thing.)
It is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Unfortunately, the righter we do the wrong things, the wronger we become. In some cases, increases in efficiency can decrease effectiveness.
With knowledge alone, we can increase the efficiency of a system, but not its effectiveness. An increase in effectiveness requires understanding, but even understanding is not sufficient. To increase the effectiveness of a man-made system, we must be aware of why it does what it does (understanding) and whether it ought to be doing it (wisdom).
Therefore, if a system is doing the wrong thing, wisdom is required to identify the error and correct it. Wisdom is holistic, not reductionistic. No amount of analysis will right the wrong thing.
A large number of studies reported by management gurus—of which Tom Peters is a prime example—and published in the management literature, particularly in the Harvard Business Review, are based on the following incorrect methodology. A set of companies are selected that are asserted to be successful and to exemplify the one or more characteristics that the author believes is responsible for their success. Another set of companies is selected that are considered to be unsuccessful and not to have the characteristics hypothesized by the author. Then the success of the successful companies is
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Human beings aren’t resources, they’re assets.
Customers were not only saturated with GE sales calls, they were oversaturated and began to respond negatively. In the research described in Ackoff and Emshoff (1975), it will be seen that continuous increases in the amount of advertising have a similar effect. Imagine how you would respond to a product that was advertised on every commercial shown on television or on every billboard.
They should be permitted to look around and determine what needs to be done that they can do, then use their observations to prepare a description of what they propose doing. People should be responsible for bringing to the attention of the appropriate persons those needs that they see unsatisfied and that they alone cannot satisfy. They should also design a development program for themselves that will enable them to do the kind of work to which they aspire.
These are not so much job descriptions as personal plans.
People tend to fulfill our expectations of them. If these expectations are low, their performance will be. If we expect abusive behavior, we usually get it. But if we expect and facilitate creative and productive behavior, we are just as likely to get that.
explanation. I found it: it was usually due to the desire to increase the salaries of persons who were already earning the top salaries permissible in their grades. The only way their salaries could be increased was to promote them into managerial positions. Then somebody had to be assigned to them to justify their title.
salary and rank should not be rigorously connected.
For managers to know what information they need (1) they must be aware of each type of decision they should make and (2) they must have an adequate model of each. The second condition, if not the first, is seldom satisfied.
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. —Niccolo Machiavelli
Control without learning may improve performance but not eliminate repetition of mistakes. Learning and adaptation, combined with memory, can prevent such repetition.
As will be seen, development cannot occur without wisdom; growth can.
Therefore, adaptation is learning under changing conditions.
mistakes tend to be concealed even from those who make them. The likelihood of such concealment increases with rank or status. Therefore, the higher the rank, the greater the claim to omniscience. This implies that learning is least likely to occur the higher one goes in an organization.
management support system should filter incoming messages for relevance and condense them so as to minimize the times required to acquire their content.
This means that supervision is no longer the appropriate function of management. Their principal functions should be (1) to create an environment in which their subordinates are encouraged and enabled to do as well as they know how, and (2) to enable their subordinates to do better tomorrow than the best they can do today.
boards are usually given seven functions: planning, policy, coordination, integration, quality of work life, performance improvement, and approval of the boss.
If anything, people who have been living in a less free society than ours welcome freedom when it becomes available, even if only at work.
Subsidized monopolies are generally insensitive and unresponsive to the users of their services, but they are sensitive and responsive to those who subsidize them. Their subsidizers are even more removed from the users of the services than those who provide them, hence less aware of the services’ deficiencies from the users’ point of view.
A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
Those who cannot cope with the complexity of life itself turn to fundamentalism; in corporations, they turn to panaceas. Fundamentalism and panaceas are retreats from complexity and the uncertainty that accompanies them. Both are types of absolutism—a doctrine that provides a simple, ready-made answer to the questions one is willing to consider and a complete disregard for any other questions. A fundamentalist’s doctrine is one that can survive any amount of disconfirming evidence because that evidence is considered to be false, a priori.
