Reinventing Organizations Quotes

“Cognitively, psychologically, and morally, moving on to a new stage is a massive feat. It requires courage to let go of old certainties and experiment with a new worldview. For a while, everything can seem uncertain and confused. It might be lonely, too, as sometimes in the process we can lose close relationships with friends and family who can no longer relate to us.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life. All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are. Eric Butterworth”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“The advice process: From the start, make sure that all members of the organization can make any decision, as long as they consult with the people affected and the people who have expertise on the matter. If a new hire comes to you to approve a decision, refuse to give him the assent he is looking for. Make it clear that nobody, not even the founder, “approves” a decision in a self-managing organization. That said, if you are meaningfully affected by the decision or if you have expertise on the matter, you can of course share your advice. A conflict resolution mechanism: When there is disagreement between two colleagues, they are likely to send it up to you if you are the founder or CEO. Resist the temptation to settle the matter for them. Instead, it’s time to formulate a conflict resolution mechanism that will help them work their way through the conflict. (You might be involved later on if they can’t sort the issue out one-on-one and if they choose you as a mediator or panel member.) Peer-based evaluation and salary processes: Who will decide on the compensation of a new hire, and based on what process? Unless you consciously think about it, you might do it the traditional way: as a founder, you negotiate and settle with the new recruit on a certain package (and then probably keep it confidential). Why not innovate from the start? Give the potential hire information about other people’s salaries and let them peg their own number, to which the group of colleagues can then react with advice to increase or lower the number. Similarly, it makes sense right from the beginning to choose a peer-based mechanism for the appraisal process if you choose to formalize such a process. Otherwise, people will naturally look to you, the founder, to tell them how they are doing, creating a de facto sense of hierarchy within the team.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“A practical tip: explore the assumptions with your team, not on your own. And as a first step, start by uncovering the unspoken assumptions behind the traditional hierarchical organizational (Amber/Orange) model: workers are lazy and untrustworthy; senior people have all the answers; employees can’t handle difficult news; and so forth.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Viktor Frankl perhaps captured it best: “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Leadership by blog post requires a degree of candor and vulnerability that few CEOs in traditional organizations would feel comfortable with.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“These stories reveal another beautiful Teal paradox: vulnerability and strength are not in opposition, but polarities that reinforce each other.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Because these are early days for Teal, most of the organizational practices you choose will be deeply countercultural. Expect people to question your choices and tell you that your choices are foolish!”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Wilber’s framework provides a simple answer: to shape the culture (the lower-left quadrant), you can pursue three avenues in parallel: Put supportive structures, practices, and processes in place (lower-right quadrant) Ensure that people with moral authority in the company role-model the behavior associated with the culture (upper-right quadrant) Invite people to explore how their personal belief system supports or undermines the new culture (upper-left quadrant)”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Culture in self-managing structures is both less necessary and more impactful than in traditional organizations. Less necessary because culture is not needed to overcome the troubles brought about by hierarchy. And more impactful, for the same reason—no energy is gobbled up fighting the structure, and all energy and attention brought to organizational culture can bear fruit. From a Teal perspective, organizational culture and organizational systems go hand in hand, and are facets of the same reality—both are equally deserving of conscious attention.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“The next step—the Evolutionary-Teal perspective—views the organization no longer as property, not even shared property in service of its different stakeholders. The organization is viewed as an energy field, emerging potential, a form of life that transcends its stakeholders, pursuing its own unique evolutionary purpose. In that paradigm, we don’t “run” the organization, not even if we are the founder or legal owner. Instead, we are stewards of the organization; we are the vehicle that listens in to the organization’s deep creative potential to help it do its work in the world.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“As with purpose itself, we should be careful not to project our individual wishes onto the organization.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“But it’s turned out that the more honest and open and candid we are with what’s going on, the more our customers are wanting to engage with us in our efforts to be a better global citizen.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“After our IPO in January 1997, we had to get better at predicting our numbers. … The market penalized us when we missed one quarter in ‘99 after we adopted a new manufacturing system. We said, “Look, we can’t predict what’s going on in the economy, and we have no idea what our orders will look like a year from now. … We don’t run this business by the numbers. The numbers will be doing what the numbers will be doing; we can just give you a good picture of what the next quarter will bring. So, we got away from making annual projections and started just doing quarterly forecasts. … We know our performance in the long run will be a result of just doing the right things every day.115”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“The pioneers researched for this book take a simpler approach: Budgets are established only if some forecast is needed to inform an important decision.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“In self-managing organizations, people can choose to set themselves targets when they find it useful—rather like a hobby runner who spurs herself on by extending her goals.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“they are invited to sit down randomly at one”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“The age of the Internet has precipitated a new worldview—one that can contemplate the possibility of distributed intelligence instead of top-down hierarchy.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“We also tend to focus less on what is wrong or missing in people and situations around us and move our attention instead to what is there, to the beauty and the potential. We trade in judgment for compassion and appreciation.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“When we see our life as a journey of unfolding toward our true nature, we can look more gently and realistically at our limitations and be at peace with what we see. Life is not asking us to become anything that isn’t already seeded in us.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“when we learn to disidentify from our own ego. By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life. We can learn to minimize our need to control, to look good, to fit in. We are no longer fused with our ego, and we don’t let its fears reflexively control our lives.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“According to the research, the trigger for vertical growth always comes in the form of a major life challenge that cannot be resolved from the current worldview. When we face such a challenge, we can take one of two approaches: we can grow into a more complex perspective that offers a solution to our problem, or we can try to ignore the problem, sometimes clinging more strongly to our existing worldview (or even shifting back to the reassuring simplicity of an earlier worldview).”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Can we create organizations free of the pathologies that show up all too often in the workplace?”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“Budgets are used to make decisions, not to control performance.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

“What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness