Quotes About Adaptation

The need to adapt is nothing new; after all, Benjamin Franklin said, "When you are finished changing, you are finished." What is new is how often we need to change, the pace at which we need to move, and the complexity and volatility of the context in which we are operating.

We throw people into launching and supporting change initiatives and projects and we just assume that life and past experiences have been a good teacher for everybody to pick up today's relevant insights and skills. But we have seen again and again that this is not necessarily true when you have to change more often and in bigger ways. Life—which means the past—can be a pretty bad teacher.

Create a New Culture. Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become strong enough to replace old traditions. Better still, make all of these steps a central part of the way you live to help you adapt to an ever faster changing world. Consider: Are we putting those who have helped make change happen in leadership roles? Have the scouts been rewarded? How can we institutionalize change, like adding scouting to the school curriculum?

transformation is a process, not an event

Without short-term wins, too many employees give up or actively join the resistance. Creating

In a less competitive and slower-moving world, weak committees can help organizations adapt at an acceptable rate. A committee makes recommendations. Key line managers reject most of the ideas. The group offers additional suggestions. The line moves another inch. The committee tries again. When both competition and technological change are limited, this approach can work. But in a faster-moving world, the weak committee always fails.

Tradition dies a hard death. Culture changes with as much difficulty in penguin colonies as in human colonies. But with this colony, culture did change.

We need to become less like an elephant and more like a customer-friendly Tyrannosaurus rex

He was speaking more rapidly and confidently and suddenly Charles understood that he was cutting the cloth to fit his faults, as everyone did at some time or other.

Q: Does it get easier? A: No, you just get better at it.

Whoever can surprise well must conquer

To survive, a technology must prove useful. In fact, it must prove more than useful; it must meet perceived needs in a manner that existing technologies don't as well as build a base of adherents who provide a monetary reason to continue investing in the technology.

Don't trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

When rival worldviews are in play, it is not adaptation that is called for but confrontation: confrontation

scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience.

Puns often seem to propagate in direct proportion to efforts aimed at suppressing them. Tell someone they can't say something, and they'll find another way, much as a river will eventually find a way round any mountain on its journey to the sea.

a suave Chinese gentleman named King, who had been a Confucian scholar and now was an elder in the church, taught the Bells the tones and characters of one of the world's most difficult languages. A slight mistake of tone may produce a completely different meaning in Chinese so the Bell's good ear for music was useful. They needed all their youthful stamina and powers of concentration, but Nelson proved a natural linguist, driven onward by awareness that he must soon run the hospital

we tear down the places where birds live, and put up places where people live, or places where people work to earn the money to pay for the places they live. We don't ask the birds for permission, nor do they complain about it. To a bird there is no tearing down or putting up.

If single Western women travelers have a hard time in Luxor, it is as nothing as compared to what single Western men have to suffer.

People don't resist change. They resist being changed! ~ Peter Senge

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got. ~ Peter F. Drucker

Change Management seems to result in lots of management and little change. What I'm really looking for is Change Leadership!~ a very frustrated CEO

Paradoxically, therefore, as economics becomes more truly scientific, it will become less of a science. Acknowledging these limitations will free it to serve us once more.

So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university.