Quotes About Organization

If…there is a conflict between structure and strategy, the structure will win.

What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

Nature programmed us to think for ourselves, take risks, and seize unexpected opportunities. This in turn suggests that if an organization wants to encourage such behavior, the most important thing it can do is to identify and stop doing whatever is currently inhibiting it. To put it bluntly, it should get off people's backs.

In a matrix structure of the kind prevalent today, thinking two levels up also has the benefit of helping to resolve the dilemmas the matrix naturally creates. The "next level up" may well be ambiguous. Two bosses might point in different directions. Understanding the level above them generally resolves the issue and allows action.

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor's classic The Principles of Scientific Management enshrined the machine model for several generations. This approach to management rests on three premises: 1 In principle it is possible to know all you need to know to be able to plan what to do. 2 Planners and doers should be separated. 3 "There is but one right way." A manager was a programmer of robot workers. The essence of management was to create perfect plans and tell people precisely

A briefing cascade will only work properly if the organizational structure broadly reflects the task structure implied by the strategy. If it is in conflict with the strategy, it should be changed before anything else.

the gap between promises and results," which it claims is itself a result of "the gap between what a company's leaders want to achieve and the ability of their organization to achieve it"; that is, the alignment gap – getting the organization to do what its leaders want.35

We've complemented that with a second office to think about how we need to prepare ourselves for that period 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, by way of investment in our technology, our organization and our people.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

Attend to the Mission Statement One of the most important dimensions of this anthropological work is researching the culturally approved language of the institution. A junior member of an organization who wishes to persuade those in power of the merits of a new and potentially threatening initiative would be well advised to couch his or her proposal in the language that is spoken and approved by those in power.

Despite their inglorious end, the legions remain to this day, thousands of years after their creation, the most pre-eminent example of how detailed organization, tight discipline, and inspiring leadership can take a group of individuals and turn them into a winning team.

We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was "serious.

One reason that it's difficult to understand is that twentieth-century managers had learned to parrot phrases like "The customer is number one!" while continuing to run the organization as an internally focused, top-down bureaucracy interested in delivering value to shareholders.

In the Agile organization, "customer focus" means something very different. In firms that have embraced Agile, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering more value to customers. Everyone in the organization has a clear line of sight to the ultimate customer and can see how their work is adding value to that customer—or not. If their work isn't adding value to any customer or user, then an immediate question arises as to why the work is being done at all.

What people want, above all, is order.

The purpose of the nervous system is to organize chaos.

Such self-organization always begins the same way, or as researchers Scott Camazine et al. put it, "At a critical density a pattern arises within the system.

In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary who would not meet Lenin for three more years, condemned his vision of organization as "military ultra-centralism." Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes—suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition.

Fix this sentence: He put the horse before the cart.

We somehow want all the 1's to "be attracted to one place", and all the 2's to "be attracted to another place". Or, put a different way, if an image is somehow "closer to being a 1" than to being a 2, we want it to end up in the "1 place" and vice versa.

I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.