Quotes About Organization

Checklists, which are a form of routinization, 'remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit'.

Food historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto proposed that cooking created mealtimes and thereby organized people into a community. For culinary historian Michael Symons, cooking promoted cooperation through sharing, because the cook always distributes food. Cooking, he wrote, is "the starting-place of trades.

Every society has to find its own protection. To avert episodes of violence we should constantly remind ourselves of how easily a complex social organization can decay, and how hard it is to construct.

I pulled out box after box, setting them haphazardly around the room. My organization lacked something -- like, say, organization ...

Throughout my training we always had a mantra; They come first. If I had really and truly screwed up my future, I'd have a new mantra; A comes first. Then B, C, D...

Without the assumption that an advantage will be long-lived, the urgency of an organization to move quickly increases.

resources are directed by a governance mechanism that is separate from any given business unit.

What we will see, increasingly, is a core of individuals who represent the long-term interests of the organization (its leaders and long-term staff) guiding the efforts of other people whose attachment is more episodic.

personal digital assistants (PDAs)

The exploitation phase needs people who thrive on designing effective processes and making things systematic. The disengagement phase requires those who are good at seeing early evidence of decline and unafraid to make the sometimes-difficult decisions to stop doing something. In an organization of any complexity, part of the challenge from the strategists' point of view is that you will have many such waves playing out, in different phases, all at the same time.

maintaining an organizational system that can maintain the complementarity between the forces for innovation and those for stability.

To be proficient, an organization needs a governance mechanism suitable for innovation (and usually separate from the planning and budgeting processes of the core business)

There are more atoms than molecules, but a molecule is more complex than an atom. There are more molecules than cells, but a cell is more complex than a molecule. And so on up the hierarchy it goes, with increasingly complex levels of organization at each higher level.

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren't even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman's conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.

We organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna-two regiments so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be jealous of First.

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones—by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one.

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed - and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design. So it is with revolution.

Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all." "Sir?" "I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place.

The room was small, but as neat as his necktie and as clean as his collar. The fireplace was swept; the floor was bare and polished. Books crowded bookshelves in every possible space. One corner was filled by an elderly flat-top desk; the papers on it were neatly in order. Near it, on its own stand, was a small electric calculator. To her right, french windows gave out on a tiny porch over the garage. Beyond it she could see the sprawling city, where a few neon signs were already blinking.

Oh, no, Sharpie. I've stood my watch; it's somebody else's turn. Now that you have resigned, we have no organization.

Only enough to protect the organization. Friday, you are well aware that the absence of Eyes and Ears today simply means that they are concealed. Be assured that I am shameless about protecting the organization.