Quotes About Adaptation

Culture has tremendous inertia," he said. "That's why it's culture. It works because it lasts. Culture strangles innovation in the crib." To combat the inertia, he decided they should go up against the resistance directly—"hit it hard," Thomas said.

Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve their operating time while others failed to improve at all. Practice, it turned out, did not necessarily make perfect.

I was impressed that he had learned to tolerate the winters.

Alice insisted the accelerator had got stuck. She thought of herself as a good driver and hated the idea that anyone would think that the problem was her age. The body's decline creeps like a vine. Day to day, the changes can be imperceptible. You adapt. Then something happens that finally makes it clear that things are no longer the same. The falls didn't do it. The car accident didn't do it. Instead, it was a scam that did. Not long after the car accident, Alice

And that summer, as Hurricane Ella made its way toward the city, an emergency crew worked at night under veil of secrecy to weld two-inch-thick steel plates around the two hundred critical bolts, and the building was secured. The Citicorp tower has stood solidly ever since. The

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained? In

doctors can be stubborn about changing the way we do things.

This has never been a problem before," people say. Until one day it is.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

the real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. Yet

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

Obstetrics went about improving the same way Toyota and General Electric went about improving: on the fly, but always paying attention to the results and trying to better them. And

If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently

When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that there are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

You always learn from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you're supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself: whatever it is that you need in order to survive. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.

I heard my old friend Clem's voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: "I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens." I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.

I soon adapted to Muriel's fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm.

would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.

In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on.

I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.

Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don't stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn't matter now.