Quotes About Adaptation

We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living.

Few of the top ten participants in the new horizontal computer industry rose from the ranks of the old vertical computer industry, bearing testimony to the observation that it is truly difficult for a successful industry participant to adapt to a completely different industry structure.

When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it.

Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change.

The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.

On the other hand, when there's a fundamental change in the industry and you don't change your skills, you will lose at both winning companies and losing companies. That is a situation that can truly be classified as a career inflection point.

When people in the company start asking questions like @But how can we say "X" when we do "Y"? more than anything else this is a tip-off that a strategic inflection point may very well be in the making

When the environment changes more rapidly than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous and unclear that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be prohibitively complicated, we need another mode of control, which is based on cultural values.

Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

This means that even as we try to standardize what we do, we should continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.

Manufacturers turn out standard products. By analogy, if you can pin down what kind of interruptions you're getting, you can prepare standard responses for those that pop up most often.

because of the ease with which Japanese office workers communicate, they have, in fact, been slow to embrace electronic mail.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done. Consequently, once the PC brought a "10X" lower cost for a given performance, it was only a matter of time before its impact would spread through the entire computing world and transform it. This change

Of course, you can't spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

It's yet another example illustrating that the person who is the star of a previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.

you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder. Now, you should still not accept disorder. In fact, you should do your best to drive what's around you to order.

Business success contains the seeds of its destruction.

replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.

I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today's gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.

Here I would like to propose Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change

The person who is the star of previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.

In Technology, whatever can be done will be done