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Gurteen Knowledge Quotations |
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I am continually adding new material to this section of my website and have compiled over 800 quotations and short excerpts. Most of them relate to knowledge, knowledge management or learning in some form but its an eclectic mix. If you wish you can subscribe to an RSS feed  Gurteen Daily Knowledge Quotes that will deliver a quote to your newsreader each day.Alternatively you may wish to register to have a quote e-mailed to you once a week or more frequently if you desire by clicking on the button below and completing the form. The list below represents the quotations that I particularly love and reflect my values and beliefs. They also help shape them. I hope you find them thought provoking and inspirational too.  We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skillful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share in common many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated. Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it. John Holt Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.M. Scott Peck If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him.John Holt Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them.John Holt The total quality movement and re-engineering both focus on process. What has been largely missing is any focus on relationship.Linda Ellinor What you perceive, your observations, feelings, interpretations, are all your truth. Your truth is important. Yet it is not The Truth.Linda Ellinor, Glenna Gerard Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.Anthony de Mello A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.Stephen Covey Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.W. Edwards Deming I think "knowledge management" is a bullshit issue. Let me tell you why. I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won't change your behavior one iota. People choose not to change their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power. Most people in most organizations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess. End of story. Michael Schrage Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.David Bohm I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.Richard Dawkins There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?Richard Dawkins The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.David Bohm There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say.Martin Buber Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.Anthony de Mello The purpose of science is not to analyse or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.Edward De Bono Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.Edward De Bono I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.Martin Buber I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.Martin Buber Beliefs: Those things we hold to be true despite evidence to the contrary.Joseph O'Connor In the perspective of every person lies a lens through which we may better understand ourselves.Ellen J. Langer We must become the change we want to see in the world.Mahatma Gandhi When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.Sigmund Freud No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.Albert Einstein The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.Daniel Goleman Judging by what I have learned about men and women, I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident. Just as the rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the underground waters to the surface. Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Kahlil Gibran Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person's behaviour. The prejudiced person can't see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holderPeter Senge The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.Henry David Thoreau If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.Albert Einstein Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.Ralph Waldo Emerson There is more to life than increasing its speed.Mahatma Gandhi I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.W. Edwards Deming The best way to predict the future is to create it.Peter F. Drucker Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.Albert Einstein The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.Yoda 1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 2. From discord, find harmony. 3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.Albert Einstein The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.Albert Einstein Nothing in the world can take place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.Voltaire One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.Victor Hugo Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every childCharles Handy If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.Andrew S. Grove But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money - booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it! W. H. Murray It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.Nicolo Machiavelli Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness.Ellen J. Langer There are three constants in life - change, choice and principles.Stephen Covey Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind. You may find this surprising. If humour is so significant, why has it been so neglected by traditional philosophers, psychologists and information scientists? Why humour is so significant and why it has been so neglected by traditional thinkers together form the key to this book. Humour tells us more about how the brain works as mind, than does any other behaviour of the mind - including reason. It indicates that our traditional thinking methods, and our thinking about these methods, have been based on the wrong model of information system. It tells us something about perception which we have traditionally neglected in favour of logic. It tells us directly about the possibility of changes in perception. It shows us that these changes can be followed by instant changes in emotion - something that can never be achieved by logic. Edward De Bono Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.Peter Senge Problems only exist in the human mind.Anthony de Mello Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, But I do not cling.Anthony de Mello What defeats poverty? Education.
What increases net worth? Education.
What helps race and ethnic relations? Education.
What creates harmony and peace? Education.
Re-educating people to live together and learn together is the foundation of our future economy.Melanie Alfonso As I grow to understand life less and less I grow to love it more and more. Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, and engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.Theodore Zeldin If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following: 57 Asians 21 Europeans 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south 8 Africans 52 would be female 48 would be male 70 would be non-white 30 would be white 70 would be non Christian 30 would be Christian 89 would be heterosexual 11 would be homosexual 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States 80 would live in substandard housing 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition 1 would be near death - 1 would be near birth 1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education 1 would own a computer When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent. Unknown So now, Athenian men, more than on my own behalf must I defend myself, as some may think, but on your behalf, so that you may not make a mistake concerning the gift of god by condemning me. For if you kill me, you will not easily find another such person at all, even if to say in a ludicrous way, attached on the city by the god, like on a large and well-bred horse, by its size and laziness both needing arousing by some gadfly; in this way the god seems to have fastened me on the city, some such one who arousing and persuading and reproaching each one of you I do not stop the whole day settling down all over. Thus such another will not easily come to you, men, but if you believe me, you will spare me; but perhaps you might possibly be offended, like the sleeping who are awakened, striking me, believing Anytus, you might easily kill, then the rest of your lives you might continue sleeping, unless the god caring for you should send you another. Socrates My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource -- individual worth.Robert M. Pirsig The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.Peter F. Drucker What is love?" "The total absence of fear," said the Master. "What is it we fear?" "Love," said the Master. Anthony de Mello The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.Socrates An unexamined life is not worth living.Socrates Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.David Weinberger You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.Dwight D Eisenhower People don't resist change; they resist being changed.Peter Senge It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.Somerset Maugham To find yourself, think for yourself.Socrates Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console, To be understood as to understand, To be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; It is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.Socrates For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those "It might have been".John Greenleaf Whittier To see a World in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. William Blake The ability to act on knowledge is power. Most people in most organizations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess.Michael Schrage There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.Sir William Bragg The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.Albert Einstein A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. Albert Einstein The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.Viktor E. Frankl Inventing the future requires giving up control. No one with a compelling purpose and a great vision knows how it will be achieved. One has to be willing to follow an unknown path, allowing the road to take you where it will. Surprise, serendipity, uncertainty and the unexpected are guaranteed on the way to the future.George Land A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.Peter F. Drucker Our own system of trying to guess what or how much a child's mind can assimilate results in cross purposes, misunderstanding, disappointments, anger and a general loss of harmony.Jean Liedloff A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.Sigmund Freud Job security is gone. The driving force of a career must come from the individual. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.Robert M. Pirsig Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.Deepak Chopra If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured it out yet.Tom Peters I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.Henry David Thoreau The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.Alan W. Watts The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.Herbert Spencer I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.Albert Einstein The ancestor of every action is a thought.Ralph Waldo Emerson Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.Viktor E. Frankl Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.Marianne Williamson What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen.Ralph Waldo Emerson Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habitAristotle A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbour. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was. Anthony de Mello The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.Lao Tzu To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.Ralph Waldo Emerson For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this world, and, although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won.Lucy Maud Montgomery You can't manage knowledge.Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears.Peter F. Drucker Whosoever reads the Scriptures in the mother tongue, shall forfeit land, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land.15th century English law Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning.It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency. Margaret J. Wheatley There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.Steve Ballmer I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs,and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.Steve Ballmer  I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.Winston Churchill Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.Margaret Thatcher If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.Albert Einstein Conversation is the most powerful learning technology ever invented. Conversations carry news, create meaning, foster cooperation, and spark innovation. Encouraging open, honest conversation through work space design, setting ground rules for conversing productively, and baking conversation into the corporate culture spread intellectual capital, improve cooperation, and strengthen personal relationships.Jay Cross We get to knowledge — especially "actionable" knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles.Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used. David Weinberger In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.Peter F. Drucker I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career -- it’s a life!”Steve Jobs If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. Winston Churchill I don't forgive people because I'm weak, I forgive them because I'm strong enough to know that people make mistakes.Unknown Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also.
Not too many generations ago, raw nature and wilderness tended to inspire fear and dread in "civilized" people. They represented Otherness and the Unknown. That which is "wild" is also "bewildering". Today, wilderness is usually considered to be something good and in need of preservation. The beauty and awesomeness of it dominate our attention. We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us. Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real. We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense. It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other. To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough. In Wildness is the preservation of the world. Henry David Thoreau In the past, Man has been first. In future, the system must be first.Frederick Winslow Taylor Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it.Aristotle I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.Martin Luther King The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labour. It is and will be knowledge.Peter F. Drucker There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.Steve Ballmer The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.Bertrand Russell Did you ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision? Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war, it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.Henry David Thoreau No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.Henry David Thoreau Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin Knowledge does not advance practice. Rather practice advances knowledge.Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or getting an 80--20 understanding of the situation. The overriding objective is engagement, creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take action.Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action. The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context.Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin Discoveries from one community cannot be repackaged and provided to another as a silver bullet, That's a "best practice" rollout and it invariably evokes the immune rejection response.Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed.
The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the “closed” mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the “open” mode - to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent. John Cleese A man with outward courage dares to die. A man with inward courage dares to live.
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