Quotes About Organization

If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.

I'm a great believer in outlines.

Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.

I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.

The European organisation contemplated could not oppose any ethnic group, on other continents or in Europe itself, outside of the League of Nations, any more than it could oppose the League of Nations.

Playing in Montreal for six years, being drafted in 2007, a lot of great moments in that organization. The positive moments outweigh the negative moments.

It doesn't eat at me. As a competitor, it drives you. It's hard to say this without someone saying, 'Golly, he doesn't care that much.' I want to win a championship for our team, for our organization. I want us to win one bad. But do I lose sleep over it? Or would I be miserable one day if I never did it? The answer is no.

I took on the role of CEO, which involves directing the Management Team and overall day-to-day operations of 500.

You don't want to take the world over with a whole hamper full of dirty clothes. That's the main thing people overlook. And take a shower, take a bath every day.

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the daily decisions you have to make, it's time to automate something.

I really, genuinely don't look at my schedule too often, because when I do, I get a little overwhelmed by how much is going on.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to.

But people never really "do as they're told." The difference between for-profit and volunteer organizations is that in the for-profit world people do get paid and so they are willing to give up some control to the boss, to accept at least some direction. But they don't give up all control. You couldn't pay them enough for that.

Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody's business.

The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.

Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I'll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Viola, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention.

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management.

Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. The assumption is almost impossible to implement unless nearly everything is in steady state.

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.

Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self.

Significant organizational learning can't happen in isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common boss.

It's not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy.