Sometimes I find sentences which are really worth by themselves, that have a lot of meaning, whether in or out of their original context. I often bookmark them but this time I think they’re worth a post. As a matter of fact I find two series of nice quotations in two posts I recently read : the first from Andrew McAfee are more about provocation (but provocation is sometimes useful to make people wonder), the second is from Jon Husband and is more about good sense.
So…let’s start with provocation :
Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
Eric Abrahamson, Columbia:Â Organizations are over-organized.
Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
Kevin Kelly, Wired: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.
…and finish with good sense :
“Networks make organizational politics and culture explicit“Â (Michael Schrage, MIT)
“The most difficult thing about IBM’s transformation was that so many people delegated responsibility upwards” (Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO)
“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust“Â (Warren Bennis, USC)
