Quotes About Hierarchy

Class in England is no more determined by wealth than it is by occupation.

herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and subordinance.3

effective systems tend to have three properties—healthy hierarchy, self-organisation and resilience—and so should be stewarded to enable these characteristics to emerge.

healthy hierarchy is achieved when nested systems serve the greater whole of which they are a part. Liver cells serve the liver, which in turn serves the human body; if those cells start to multiply rapidly, they become a cancer, no longer serving but destroying the body on which they depend.

poverty was not always a disadvantage at the baths. Far from making everyone equal, nudity imposed its own hierarchy, one that frequently favoured the toned body of the poorest freedman or slave over that of the indulged, unexercised rich man.

Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems.

He felt people at IBM worshiped hierarchies. Each employee worried about his little piece of turf and nothing else. Diamond still recalled with amazement the time an IBM programmer, hacking away at OS/2, watched the program crash to a halt. The guy studied his screen for a minute, then said, "Wow, what a nasty problem. Glad that isn't in my code." He restarted his PC and went back to work, never even reporting the bug. At

The Church needs a firm hierarchy and is forced to distrust such of her underlings as show a tendency to become too holy.

It is not fit that men should be compared with gods.

Civilization had long maintained the appearance of such communal closeness, in small units people could manage. Societies had evolved that could stack such social nuggets into vaster larger arrays. A squad of ten worked well together, and united with ten other squads could do far more. Those ten who commanded squads could then meet in a room and make up a squad themselves, and so on up a pyramid that could sum the labours of billions. All

It's easy to believe that large-scale human action is impossible without a top-down power structure. Unity of command ensures clarity of direction. Clear lines of authority minimize ambiguity. Tiered decision rights align power and competence. Absent formal hierarchy, there's anarchy, right? Well, maybe not.

In a formal hierarchy, the power to initiate change tends to be concentrated at the top. Major pivots require a top-level sign-off. The problem is, by the time an issue is big enough to capture the CEO's scarce attention, the organization is already playing catch-up. Leaders are insulated—organizationally, culturally, and geographically—from the fringes where new trends take shape.

In a hierarchical organization, the responsibility for setting strategy and direction is vested in a handful of senior executives. Those at the top are expected to be uniquely farsighted, inquisitive, and creative. In practice, this is often not the case.

Science is most definitely not a priesthood where people stand on a mountain and pass truths down to the waiting minions below.

They established a hierarchy of four High Gods over the rest of the pantheon, and Seven Who Decree the Fates. They had no idea that an insignificant scrapper, the Watcher called Gadreel, would bide his time, build his strength and perfect his fighting technique to become the mighty Ninurta of Uruk, and now Marduk of Babylon. Ishtar had to admit that he had been clever about it. She stood before her tent, watching the puny humans labor on her fabulous temple, musing on the Plan of the Watchers.

Like all those in the service of the gods, the isib had an elongated skull, was shorn of all hair, and carried the tattoos and piercings of the deity on his body beneath his multicolored linen robes. He was not one of the eunuchs. He was being groomed by Lugalanu himself to become a sanga, the next highest level of priest, an administrator with an eye toward becoming an ensi, the high priest.

The Prince of Wales is known not to care too much for Princess Michael of Kent, and as we have seen when he lived at Kensington Palace he discouraged his servants from having anything to do with the Michaels' staff. The Gloucesters, who are above the Kents in the order of precedence, also do not socialize with Prince and Princess Michael, nor do their staff, but they do mix with the senior branch of the Kent family, the Duke and Duchess. The

But that was not the Royal Way; the King's servants didn't have to stoop.

Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places.

creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As

You can't assume a goddamned thing in this Navy.

To manufacture unity, the imperialists of history followed another animal pattern, that of the dominance hierarchy—the strangely unjust principle which sometimes uses brutality to bring individuals or collections of groups together in a stable and ultimately peaceful form. It's ironic that one of our strongest forces of cohesion should be something so unpleasant as our will to lord it over others and that this ace-attractor should be egged on by repulsers—

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.