Sublime

there was an individual in the organization who wielded so much control over the fate of a funding request that he was menacingly referred to as “the gatekeeper.” To protect the innocent, we’ll call this person Reginald. A notorious stickler for detail, Reginald tries so hard to control costs that in the end he actually creates waste.

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*

most government agencies, public schools, religious institutions, and the military are run based on Conformist-Amber principles and practices.

Green is very present in postmodern academic thinking, in nonprofits, and among social workers and community activists.

Impulsive-Red Organizations don’t scale well for those reasons—they rarely manage to keep in line people who are separated from the chief by more than three or four degrees.

This is usually referred to as “complexity” or “chaos theory” (the Teal equivalent to Orange’s Newtonian science).

his human flock, and it was thus right and natural for his subjects to obey him

For example, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, the world’s first city-states were founded on the idea of the king as the good shepherd: the king protected and provided for

Manage yourself and orchestrate others to get what you want.