Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management Quotes

“There are ideologies of control lying behind the insistence on the need for instrumentally rational tools and techniques. In reflecting these ideologies, some believe that without the tools and techniques organizations would not be able to produce success; indeed, they would be ungovernable. Others believe that without the tools and techniques it would be impossible to improve the human condition or take action to sustain the planet. There is a very powerful belief that ‘we’ must be able to improve whole organizations intentionally. For some, these beliefs are impervious to reason, perhaps because it is too disappointing to accept the humbler realization that success and failure, sustainability and destruction, all emerge across populations through myriad local interactions and all anyone can do is participate as meaningfully and as influentially as possible, acting on practical judgment, in these local interactions.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity

“Cults are maintained when leaders present to people’s imagination a future free from obstacles that could prevent them from being what they all want to be. The visions that leaders of organizations are nowadays supposed to have are examples of this.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity

“This means that the use of the tools of instrumental rationality cannot be rational in an objective, instrumental sense. Their use will arouse emotion, threaten or sustain existing power relations, provoke resistance and conflict between different ideologies. Instrumental rationality turns out to be a fiction in ordinary everyday life in organizations.”
― Ralph D. Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenge of Complexity