Quotes About Adaptation

School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

When Theolyn died, the humans had built an enormous pyre and placed his body at the center. How was [Veka] supposed to know humans cremated their dead instead of cooking them? She had figured it out quickly enough, but not before Jimar and his ilk had spotted her standing at the pyre, fork in hand.

He was able to hear the world say "no" to him in the form of failed experiments;

Stop Trying to Control the Outcome Focus on Your Behavior and Actions Instead

The mood has changed. It's heavier. We were liquid; now we're stones.

And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It's always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it.

Wheat—like men and women—benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better.

Looking back on those games, I probably hustled out of position as much as I hustled into position since I really never had any real training. I was working on instincts alone.

The law of the jungle which I learned at a young age, and have been trying to escape ever since, is that we what we must to survive.

Transitions themselves are not the issue, but how well you respond to their challenges!

After missing the cut at the 1957 Masters because of poor putting, Hogan retired to the clubhouse and suggested that putting should no longer be a part of the game. "If I had my way," Hogan grumbled, "every golf green would be made into a huge funnel. You hit the funnel and the ball would roll down a pipe into the hole. I've always considered that golf is one game," Hogan added, "and putting another.

Yes, its one of the basic truths of the universe,....Things don't disappear. They just change, and change and change again.

A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control—they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.

In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.

Newtonian versus quantum, predictability versus flexibility, optimization versus adaptation, efficiency versus innovation—all these dichotomies reflect a fundamentally different way of making sense about the world and how to manage effectively within it.

Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.

The formula for success is simple: deliver today, adapt tomorrow.

The ability to respond to change is good. The ability to create change for competitors is even better. When you create change you are on the competitive offensive. When you respond to competitors' changes you are on the defensive. When you can respond to change at any point in the development lifecycle, even late, then you have a distinct advantage.

Adaptation can be considered a mindful response to change.

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline.

Agile organizations must adhere to the same values as agile teams: • Delivering value over meeting constraints • Leading the team over managing tasks • Adapting to change over conforming to plans Executives and managers need to lead their organizations in living these values and taking actions based on them—and one of the critical areas on which they need to take action is measuring performance in ways that encourage their organizations to embrace agility.