Quotes About Change

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Hence one can think of a crisis as a moment of truth: a turning point, when conditions before and after that "moment" are "much more" different from one another than before and after "most" other moments.

It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.

leaders sometimes make a difference. But it depends on the type of leader, and on the type of effect examined.

1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis.

The key word here is "selective." It's neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don't need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.

The "crisis" is a sudden realization of, or a sudden acting on, pressures that have been building up for a long time. This truth was acknowledged explicitly by Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who (as we'll see in Chapter 7) devised a whirlwind program of apparently major changes in 19 days of December 1972, but who downplayed his own reforms as a "recognition of what has already happened.

In 1948, a married couple with the median income and two children paid only 2 percent of its income in state, federal, and social security taxes. In 1991 they paid 30 percent.

When you're a kid and a teen, you're not in control of your circumstances. But the beautiful thing about growing up is that you get to create your own reality and your own family. That family might be a group of tight-knit friends, that family might be a spouse and children of your own. But ultimately, your childhood realities do not have to perpetuate themselves into adulthood, not if you don't let them. It for sure takes work.

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

Top-down change without honest feedback from those affected by the change simply will not work.

Process helps make sense of change, but blindly following a process is a recipe for disaster

El cambio es tanto un arte como una ciencia

If you truly want to understand something, try to change it - Kurt Lewin -

Disruptive innovation is good. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not. Culture

Lean Change Management moves the slider for managing change from using plan-driven aproaches to feedback-driven aproaches

The QMO, worked closely with the PMO throughout the Kanban transformation, but we never tried to change them. Our stance was to help them understand what was different about how projects were governed with the new Agile practices so they could decide what to change.

If you don't change course - if you don't have something waiting for you, even if it's just to occupy you until you turn eighteen, you're not going to make it. You need to make a plan for next year.

Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works

Good advice rarely changes, while markets change constantly. The temptation to pander is almost irresistible. And while people need good advice, what they want is advice that sounds good.

we often find out that what we thought we wanted before we got it is no longer what we really want once we have it.

Don't let anyone tell you the future is already written. The best any prophet can do is to give you the most likely version of future events. It is up to us to accept the future for what it is, or change it. It is easy to go with the flow; it takes a person of singular courage to go against it.

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isnt what it used to be?

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.