About the
leader’s role in change
“Be the change you want to create
in the world”
- Gandhi
“Be the ball:”
-Bill Murray (from ‘Caddyshack’)
“When the best leader’s
work is done, the people say, ‘We
did it ourselves’”
- Lao-Tzu
“There is no change without vulnerability”
- Dr. Carl Hammerschlag
“The Sour Krout the Men at first
would not eat until I put in practice
a method I never once knew to fail with
seamen, and this was to have some of
it dress’d every Day for the Cabbin
Table, and permitted all the Officers
without exception to make use of it and
left it to the option of the Men either
to take as much as they pleased or none
at all; but this practice was not continued
above a week before I found it necessary
to put every one on board to an Allowance,
for such are the Tempers and Disposissions
of Seaman in general that whatever you
give them out of the Common Way, altho
it be ever so much for their good yet
it will not go down with them and you
will hear nothing but murmurings gainest
the man that first invented it; but the
Moment they see their Superiors set a
Value upon it, it becomes the finest
stuff in the World and the inventer a
Dam’d Honest Fellow.”
- from The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin
“ It’s good to be King”
- Mel Brooks (from ‘History of the World, Part 1’)
“What do you do when you find
yourself in a hole? The first thing to
do is stop digging.”
- Jim Walker, quoted in ‘The Answer to How is Yes’ by Peter Block
‘There’s not much difference
between leading a hunting party and leading
a software development group”
- The archetypical ‘First Boss’
“ We’ll know we’re there when my first-line supervisors sit
around during break and talk about who’s doing the right things that day,
instead of who’s screwing up”- Plant superintendent, high tech industry
About thinking and perspectives
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge."
- Daniel J. Boorstin
“ If everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking”
- Benjamin Franklin
“Knowledge is Good”
- Motto of Faber College, from Animal House
“ We cannot solve the problems of today using the same thought process
that created them”
-Albert Einstein
“ For fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society,
but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion
of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with
our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve
most of them . . .
The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an
illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and
confusion”
- David Bohm
“ What if …. the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about?”
- Erin Harlan, Tom Hanson (Fairview Health Services)
About intention and execution
“ Organizational insanity can be defined as doing the same things over
and over, and expecting the results to be different”
- Unattributed, part of the modern mythology of change
“Once the ‘what’ is
decided, the ‘how’ always
follows. We must not make the ‘how’ an
excuse for not facing and accepting the ‘what’”
- Pearl Buck
“ It is not that the ideal of Christianity has been tried and found wanting;
rather it has been found difficult and untried”
- G. K. Chesterton
“95% of life is just showing up”
- Woody Allen
“They always say that time changes
things, but actually you have to change
them yourself”
- Andy Warhol
“After a battle is over, people
talk a lot about how decisions were methodically
reached, but actually there’s always
a hell of a lot of groping around”
- - Frank Jack Fletcher
About the Inevitability of Change
“There is nothing permanent except
change”
- Heraclitus
“Everything changes but change
itself”
- John F. Kennedy
“Change is the only evidence of
life”
- Evelyn Waugh |
