Quotes About Organization

Then there is the worst part of Christianity, which is awful: power, corruption, manipulation... But then again, these feature are ever present in any organization.

We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end.

Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power.

I belong to no organized political party; I'm a Democrat

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.

I have spent most of my life most happily in making plans for others to carry out.

It is for these reasons that managing the neutral zone is so essential during a period of enormous change. Neutral zone management isn't just something that would be nice if you had more time. It's the only way to ensure that the organization comes through the change intact and that the necessary changes actually work the way that they are supposed to.

restrain the natural impulse in times of ambiguity and disorganization to push prematurely for certainty and closure. It is tempting to rally around, to have "everyone pulling together," in the neutral zone, but be careful that you don't unwittingly squeeze out dissent or other ways of thinking.

Such conflicts are reminders of the Fourth Law of Organizational Development: whenever there is a painful, troubled time in the organization, a developmental transition is probably going on.

change and endings go hand in hand: change causes transition, and transition starts with an ending. If things change within an organization, at least some of the employees and managers are going to have to let go of something

transitions will need to make sense to people, for otherwise people will resist them and make it far harder for the organization to grow as it must.

Looking at each of these cases as simply "innovation" underestimates the challenge they faced. What innovation's champions are actually doing is creating a new organization, and to do that they must go back to the start of the life cycle. What we call "an innovation" is really a new Dream.

One of the biggest problems that endings cause in an organization is confusion. Things change, and obviously the organization won't do some of the things it used to do.

Executive teams we have worked with can often, in hindsight, lay out a clear chronology of the stages of their organization's development and the events that triggered the transition from one stage to the next. But in the moment these same people found it very difficult to describe exactly what was happening.

Every organizational system has its own natural "immune system" whose task it is to resist unfamiliar, and so unrecognizable, signals. That is not necessarily bad.

Be careful that in urging people to turn away from the past you don't drive them away from you or from the new direction that the organization needs to take. Present innovations as developments that build on the past and help to realize its potential. Honor the past for what it has accomplished

This picture in people's heads is the reality they live in, and one of the losses that takes place during the ending phase of a transition is that the old picture—the mental image of how and why things are the way they are—falls apart. Much of the pain of the neutral zone comes from the fact that it is a time without a viable organizational picture.

The first thing you're going to need in order to handle nonstop organizational change is an overall design within which the various and separate changes are integrated as component elements. In periods of major strategic change, such a design may have been announced to the organization by its leadership. When that happens, you're fortunate. Even if you don't entirely agree with the logic of the larger change, you benefit from the coherence it gives to the component changes.

But immune systems carry a price tag: even good germs get filtered out or killed off. The pre-transition immune system choked off creativity in its own manner, and no matter how loose and free the post-transition way of doing things is, its immune system will also make creativity difficult in some different way. It is during the gap between the old and the new that the organization's immune system is weak enough to let a seedbed for novelty form.

Each great company will be known as controlled by one master mind. The reason for this lies in the great superiority of personal management over management by boards and committees. This

In this country, where workmen move about frequently and with facility, the unions suffer in their harmony and stability. It

plutocracy would be a civil organization in which the power resides in wealth, in