Reframing Organizations Artistry, Choice, and Leadership Quotes

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Owen tried to convince fellow capitalists that investing in people could produce a greater return than investments in machinery. But the business world dismissed him as a wild radical whose ideas would harm the people he wanted to help (O'Toole, 1995). Owen was at least 100 years ahead of his time.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Teams often get launched in a vacuum, with little or no training or support, no changes in the design of their work, and no new systems like e-mail to help communication between teams. Frustrations mount, and people wind up in endless meetings trying to figure out why they are a team and what they are expected to do.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“The members of Team Six “are bound together not only by sworn oaths, but also by the obligations of their brotherhood” (Pfarrer, 2011, p. 28). As one team member described it, “My relationship with Team Six has been more important than my marriage” (Wadsin and Templin, p. 254). Published”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“When managers and consultants fail, government frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. In earlier times, the federal government limited its formal influence to national concerns such as the Homestead Act and the Post Office. Now constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” But policymakers often don’t understand the problem well enough to get the solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Peters, 1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers, for example, have been trying for decades to reform U.S. public schools. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. The result? About as successful as America’s switch to the metric system. In the 1950s Congress passed legislation mandating adoption of metric standards and measures. More than six decades later, if you know what a hectare is, or can visualize the size of a three-hundred-gram package of crackers, you’re ahead of most Americans. Legislators did not factor into their solution what it would take to get their decision implemented.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“When managers and consultants fail, government frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. In earlier times, the federal government limited its formal influence to national concerns such as the Homestead Act and the Post Office. Now constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” But policymakers often don’t understand the problem well enough to get the solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Peters, 1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers,”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Targeting individuals, while ignoring larger system failures, oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Significance is built through the use of many expressive and symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories, and music. An organization without a rich symbolic life grows empty and barren. The magic of special occasions is vital in building significance into collective life. Moments of ecstasy are parentheses that mark life’s major passages. Without ritual and ceremony, transition remains incomplete, a clutter of comings and goings; “life becomes an endless set of Wednesdays” (Campbell, 1983, p. 5).”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“conceptual heart. But we have incorporated new research and revised our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback delayed or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Gupta and Jobs were both brilliant men who accomplished extraordinary things. But each descended into a period of cluelessness, becoming so cocooned in his own world view that he couldn’t see other options. That’s what it means to be clueless. You don’t know what’s going on, but you think you do, and you don’t see better choices. So you do more of what you know, even though it’s not working. You hope in vain that if you just try harder, you’ll succeed.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership