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Planning is no longer primarily a staff function for coming up with the proper “answer” which managers must then implement, but a process “whereby management teams,” says former planning head Arie de Geus, “change their shared mental models of their company, their markets, and their competitors.”
Art Kleiner • The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization
Since few professionals like to be told what to do, the manager must act through persuasion and cajoling, even where the manager sees the way clear. Living with the frustrations of building consensus and resisting the temptation to just act are a permanent struggle.
David H. Maister • Managing the Professional Service Firm
Russell Ackoff • The Systems Thinker – A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker
“Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”
John Willis • Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future
There is a natural tendency for people in such staff functions, often with the best of intentions, to prove their worth by finding ways to “add value”, devising rules and procedures, building up expertise, finding new problems to solve. Ultimately, they concentrate power and decision-making away from the frontline. People there feel disempowered: t
... See moreFrederic Laloux • Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
The motto I’m advocating is “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
Andrew S. Grove • High Output Management
You want problems solved by the right people who can do it most effectively.
John Seiffer • Output Thinking: Scale Faster, Manage Better, Transform Your Company
The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.
Peter F. Drucker • The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)
The second book he bought was Drift into Failure by Sidney Dekker, which he passed out to all his IT infrastructure and operations people. Dekker’s book forces organizational managers to rethink blame and accountability in complex processes. When something goes wrong, it asks, “Should you blame the person? Or is it the system?”2*