Quotes About Adaptation

New York in the 1880's was already a city that seemed to have made up its mind that whatever existed was dispensable and replaceable

Described by a contemporary as "Napoleonic in stature," he was diminutive, and to overcome this he took to placing his office

Beginning with roughly a hundred acres (before he had finished he had added another three hundred), Mr. Lawrence decided to build a town. When his contractor asked him where to put the streets, Lawrence looked at the cow paths meandering up and down the hills and said, "Why not make the streets follow the cow paths?" And so, following the rules of bovine common sense, there the streets are for Mr. Mumford to admire.

various unpleasant and unexpected side effects of someone's renovation.

Something of an exception in their approach to education—as indeed they often were to other things—were the Seligmans, led by Joseph, whose longing for Americanization was overpowering. Several of his brothers had early Americanized their first names. Henry was originally Hermann, William was Wolf, James was Jacob, Jesse was Isaias, and Leopold was Lippmann.

similar job elsewhere?

Do not try to predict the effects your actions will have, because you can't. Instead, encourage people to adapt their actions to realize the overall intention as they observe what is actually happening. Give them boundaries which are broad enough to take decisions for themselves and act on them.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

Nature programmed us to think for ourselves, take risks, and seize unexpected opportunities. This in turn suggests that if an organization wants to encourage such behavior, the most important thing it can do is to identify and stop doing whatever is currently inhibiting it. To put it bluntly, it should get off people's backs.

Ohno is credited with the saying that "having no problems is the biggest problem of all." The result is the most productive automotive manufacturing system in the world today, which is sustaining its lead despite every attempt by its rivals to copy it. It has its origins in the need to overcome a constraint.

His methods did not only develop what Argyris and Schon have called "single-loop learning," in which an organization learns to correct its actions so as to carry on its current policies and fulfill its current objectives, but "double-loop learning," in which the organization's policies, objectives, and behavioral norms are modified.11

Agassiz explained his reasons for doubting the creative power of natural selection. Small-scale variations, he argued, had never produced a "specific difference" (i.e., a difference in species). Meanwhile, large-scale variations, whether achieved gradually or suddenly, inevitably resulted in sterility or death. As he put it, "It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.

There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows."19

natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

As Darwin described it, the ability of natural selection to produce significant biological change depends upon the presence of three distinct elements: (1) randomly arising variations, (2) the heritability of those variations, and (3) a competition for survival, resulting in differences in reproductive success among competing organisms.

Those who rejected it wholesale, as Agassiz did, consigned themselves to increasing irrelevance. AGASSIZ

host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or "microevolutionary," change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovation

requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

According to Darwinian theory, differences in biological form should increase gradually, steadily increasing the number of distinct body plans and phyla, over time. References for first appearances are found in note 5 of this chapter.

Remove the rock from your shoe rather than learn to limp comfortably.

Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.

Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.

The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We're aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.

When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone." Wow.