Jack Penn (1909-1996).

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.

George Burns.

Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave 'em all over everything you do.

Elvis Presley.

Don't worry that your children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

Fulghum, Robert. 1989. It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, New York: Ivy Books, 102.

Each of us knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us know the same mind from the inside. No other kind of thing is known about in that way.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1996. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, New York: Basic Books, 3.

Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.

Schultz, Charles M.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Lynes, Russell. 1954. Reader's Digest, cf The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996, Columbia University Press, entry 37069.

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Cohen, Leonard. 1992. Anthem. On The Future: Sony.

To identify real customer needs, look for the trouble spots in your product or service -- that's where the opportunity for innovation lies.

Throneburg, Jim. cf Donna Fenn. 2005. Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack. New York: Collins, 128.

The source of all our problems today comes from the gap between how we think and how nature works.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine and Lewis Galantiere. 1969. Flight to Arras. Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books, 129.

Without question, the most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity.

Hock, Dee. 2005. One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 55.

Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.

Koestler, Arthur. 1989. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Arkana, 232.

Kopeikina, Luda. 2005. The Right Decision Every Time: How to Reach Perfect Clarity on Tough Decisions. Boston: Prentice Hall, 7.

What experience and history teach us is this -- that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1956. The Philosophy of History. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Mindfulness is an effortless, simple process that consists of drawing novel distinctions, that is, noticing new things.

The more we notice, the more we become aware of how things change depending on the context and perspective from which they are viewed.

Langer, Ellen. 2005. On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. New York: Ballantine Books, 5.

.. at companies suffering breakdowns, we find in case after case that it wasn't an isolated slip-up or instance of incompetence on the part of an individual employee. In virtually every example, it was the way the system had been set up that was to blame.

Who is responsible for letting a company get into this condition? A mistaken picture of reality will contribute to this state of affairs, and this state of affairs will help preserve a mistaken picture of reality.

Finkelstein, Sydney. 2003. Why Smart Executives Fail. New York: Portfolio, 212.

If senior managers and know-how managers share a common view of the industry, the likelihood of their acknowledging changes in the environment and responding in an appropriate fashion will greatly increase. Sharing a common picture of the map of the industry and its dynamics is a key tool in making your organization an adaptive one.

Grove, Andrew. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive. New York: Currency Doubleday, 135.

When you have to reach large numbers of people, you can't possibly overcommunicate and overclarify.

Grove, Andrew. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive. New York: Currency Doubleday, 155.

If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless.

Koestler, Arthur. 1989. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Arkana, 82.

..only one sort of man has ever been happy, has ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interest and illusions...he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in actions to do that will by the so-discovered means.

Shaw, George Bernard. 2001. Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy. New York: Penguin, 151.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Ask yourself: Does the rest of your life have this many holes that you are not seeing?

Wind, Yoram (Jerry), Colin Crook with Robert Gunther. 2005. The Power of Impossible Thinking, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 9.

It is remarkable how many smart, highly motivated, and apparently responsible people rarely pause to contemplate their own behavior.

Sherman, Stratford, and Alyssa Freas. 2004. The Wild West of Executive Coaching, Harvard Business Review, 82 (5): 85.

The brain apparently makes no distinction between the image seen by the eye and the various details it has filled in. We are all unaware of the significant blind spot in our eye at the point where the optical nerve enters. The brain makes a guess at what should be there, fills in the missing gap and it all looks quite consistent.

Wind, Yoram (Jerry), Colin Crook with Robert Gunther. 2005. The Power of Impossible Thinking, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 243.

We are caught off guard when common sense fails us. Yet it is clear we would live in a deadly dull world if common sense were sufficient to lead us through all the mazes around us…

Common sense is the center of gravity we return to after our flights of fancy. But it is the delicious surprise – the idea that precedes expectation – that makes science, technology, and invention such a delight.

Lienhard, John. 2000. The Engines of Our Ingenuity, New York: Oxford University Press, 35.

Often people need greater clarity before they can act decisively and with full commitment. Once they see clearly their heart’s intent, their focus becomes like a laser – a powerful, coherent beam, as opposed to an incandescent, incoherent light.

An earnest commitment from the heart emerges, vision becomes clearer, broader, and more inclusive of others. Strength of will is replaced by energetic integrity and a knowingness of ‘what else is there’ or ‘I can’t afford to not do this.’

White, John. 2004. Institute of HeartMath (cf Senge, Peter, Claus Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. 2004. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning.)

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Rogers, Will.

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.

Sayre, Wallace S. Quoted in Charles Issawi, Issawi's Laws of Social Motion (1973).

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.

Shaw, George Bernard. 2001. Dedicatory Epistle. Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy. New York: Penguin, 32.

Managers and leaders are different kinds of people…

Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes towards goals. Managerial goals arise out of necessities rather than desires and, therefore, are deeply imbedded in their organization’s history and culture...

Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, in evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes. The net result of this influence changes the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.

Zalenik, Abraham. 2004. Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? Harvard Business Review 82 (1):75-76.

An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and inertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way of doing things and against the taking of risks and striking out in new directions.

Rockefeller III, John D. 1973. The Second American Revolution: Some Personal Observations. New York: HarperCollins.

Leadership is the accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants…(The leader's) unique achievement is a human and social one, which stems from his understanding of his fellow workers and the relationship of their individual goals to the group goal that he must carry out.

Prentice, W. C. H. 2004. Understanding Leadership. Harvard Business Review 82 (1): 102-109.

As far as preparing to work in the future, I'll tell you what I tell my children. At the personal level, you develop three basic skills: learning, critical thinking, and systems thinking. Critical thinking means you ask the right questions; systems thinking means you see the big picture. If you do that, you will have a set of skills that transcends any particular set of technical skills, which may or may not become obsolete.

Hammer, Michael. 1997. PM Network, September.

The search for an explanation often begins when we notice that something is different, unusual, or wrong. Usually, it takes an unexpected event to pique our curiosity.

Einhorn, Hillel J., and Robin M. Hogarth. 1987. Decision Making: Going Forward in Reverse. Harvard Business Review 65 (1): 66-70.

For thousands of years, humans paid little attention to measuring or quantifying economic activity. Business was viewed in terms of serving customer needs by employing human talents…

But, increasingly after World War II.. business-people came to discuss their organizations in terms of abstract quantities, not concrete human affairs. They spoke, for example, of providing for customer needs in terms of “revenue” and employing human talents in terms of “cost.”

Profit, the quantitative difference between revenue and cost, was increasingly viewed as the primary goal of business, especially as more widespread share ownership separated the ownership of business from the activities of running business operations. By the 1970s, maximization of shareholder wealth became widely accepted as the one and only goal of business.

Johnson, H. Thomas. 2004. Confronting the Tyranny of Management by Numbers. Reflections: The SoL Journal 5 (4): 1-17.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Shaw, George Bernard. 2000. Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books, p. 260.

Experienced negotiators are generally comfortable working out the terms of an economic contract: They bargain for the best price, haggle over equity splits, and iron out detailed exit clauses. But these same seasoned professionals often spend so much time hammering out the letter of the deal that they pay little attention to the social contract, or the spirit of the deal.

So while the parties agree to the same terms on paper, they may actually have very different expectations about how the agreement will work in practice. Without arriving at a true meeting of the minds, the deal they've signed may sour.

Fortgang, Ron S., David A. Lax, and James K. Sebenius. 2003. Negotiating the Spirit of the Deal. Harvard Business Review 81 (2): 67.

Most of us (would define) a formal organization as a purposive aggregation of individuals who exert concerted effort toward a common and explicitly recognized goal. Yet we can hardly accept this definition whole, suspecting .. that individuals within organizations rarely have a common understanding of goals.

Ouchi, William G. 1980. Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans. Administrative Science Quarterly 25 (1): 129-141.

We don't have enough time to do it right; just enough time to do it over.

Senior Executive of a Global Fortune 1000 company, October 8, 2003.

For an endeavor to be successful and lead to the achievement of an objective, it requires valid thoughts and emotions.

H.H. Dalai Lama. 1999. Training the Mind, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 7.

Imagine going to your doctor because you're not feeling well. Before you've had a chance to describe your symptoms, the doctor writes out a prescription and says, "Take two of these three times a day, and call me next week."

"But -- I haven't told you what's wrong," you say. "How do I know this will help me?"

"Why shouldn't it?" says the doctor. "It worked for my last two patients."

No competent doctors would ever practice medicine like this, nor would any sane patient accept it if they did. Yet professors and consultants routinely prescribe such generic advice, and managers routinely accept such therapy, in the naive belief that if a particular course of action helped other companies to succeed, it ought to help theirs, too.

Christensen, Clayton M. and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. Why Hard-Nosed Executives Should Care About Management Theory, Harvard Business Review, 81(9), 67.

An integrated, holistic perspective is required to make strategy.

Bower, Joseph (Professor at Harvard Business School). 2003. Session on "Strategy as Iterative Resource Allocation," Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Seattle, August 4.

Mindlessness is the application of yesterday's business solutions to today's problems. Mindfulness is attunement to today's demands to avoid tomorrow's difficulties.

Langer, Ellen J. 1989. Mindfulness. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 152.

(Mindfulness is) a state of alertness and lively awareness that is manifested in active information processing, characterized by the creation and refinement of categories and distinctions and the awareness of multiple perspectives.

... Mindlessness is characterized by relying on past categories, acting on automatic pilot, precluding attention to new information and fixating on a single perspective... Trapped in previously created categories, these individuals easily confuse the stability of their assumptions with stability in the world, thus giving themselves a false reading on their surroundings.

Fiol, C. Marlene, and Edward J. O'Connor. 2003. Waking Up! Mindfulness in the Face of Bandwagons, Academy of Management Review, 28(1), 59. Discussing research by Ellen J. Langer.

.. companies must be integrated across whatever interface drives performance along the dimension that customers value. In an industry's early days, integration typically needs to occur across interfaces that drive raw performance, for example, design and assembly.

Once a product's basic performance is more than good enough, competition forces firms to compete on convenience or customization. In these situations, specialist firms emerge and the necessary locus of integration typically shifts to the interface with the customer.

Christensen, Clayton M., Michael E. Raynor, and Scott D. Anthony. 2003. Six Keys to Creating New-Growth Businesses, Harvard Management Update, January, 5.

.. by helping us to understand better the relationship between cause and effect that pertains to complex, connected systems, the science of networks teaches us .. that such systems, from power grids to businesses, and even entire economies, are both more vulnerable and more robust than populations of isolated entities. Networks share resources and distribute loads, but they also spread disease and transmit failure -- they are both good and bad.

But unless we can understand exactly how connected systems are connected, we cannot predict how they will behave. And unless we know what kind of behavior we are trying to understand, we don't even know what it is about the network that is supposed to matter.

Watts, Duncan J. 2003. Unraveling the Mysteries of the Connected Age, The Chronicle of Higher Education, B9.

... feelings are typically indispensable for rational decisions; they point us in the proper direction, where dry logic can then be of best use. While the world often confronts us with an unwieldy array of choices (How should you invest your retirement savings? Whom should you marry?), the emotional learning that life has given us (such as the memory of a disastrous investment or a painful breakup) sends signals that streamline the decision by eliminating some options and highlighting others at the outset. In this way .., the emotional brain is as involved in reasoning as is the thinking brain.

Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books, 28.

Although in making decisions for his agency, the recreation administrator may fail to weigh the diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives against one another in terms of their relative importance, yet his actual decisions, and the direction which he gives to the policy of his agency will amount in practice to a particular set of weights for these objectives.

If the program emphasizes athletics for adolescent boys, then this objective is given an actual weight in practice which it may, or may not, have had in the consciousness of the administrator planning the program.

Hence, although the administrator may refuse the task, or be unable to perform it, of consciously and deliberately integrating his system of objectives, he cannot avoid the implications of his actual decisions, which achieve such a synthesis in fact.

Simon, Herbert A. 1997. Administrative Behavior, 4th ed. New York : Free Press, 5.

Most managers understand the importance of building and conserving the resources of their business, both tangible items such as staff and customers and intangibles such as staff morale and investor support.

They also know that resources are interdependent -- good product quality is of little value if delivery performance damages reputation with customers, and a highly motivated salesforce can do little with a poor range of products.

"Ranking" resources in order of importance is thus pointless -- if any resource is in bad shape, the whole business is endangered.

Warren, Kim. 2002. Competitive Strategy Dynamics, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 15.

And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left.....the eyes and ears are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat leaves a corpse. The corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.

Steinbeck, J. 1939. The Grapes of Wrath, Stonehenge Press, 128-129.

To believe, to believe is one of the most creative experiences that exists. To trust is one of the most enriching and empowering possibilities that man can offer himself. To live without fear is the only option that can recover joy, good humor and the smile in one's life. (English translation of original Spanish text below.)

Creer, creer es una de las experiencias más creativas que existen. Confiar Es una de Las posiciones más amplificadores, más posibilitantes que se puede dar el hombre. Vivir sin temor, Es la única opción de recuperar la alegría, El humor y la sonrisa.

Dr. Jose Luis Padilla, Estilos de Salud, Escuela Neijing, 2001.

Integral: the word means to integrate, to bring together, to join, to link, to embrace. Not in the sense of uniformity, and not in the sense of ironing out all the wonderful differences, colors, zigs and zags of a rainbow-hued humanity, but in the sense of unity-in-diversity, shared commonalities along with our wonderful differences.

Wilber, Ken. 2001. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 2.

Every decision is a commitment of present resources to the uncertainties of the future. This, according to elementary probability mathematics, means that decisions will turn out to be wrong more often than right. At the least they will have to be adjusted...

The decision always has to be bailed out. That requires two things. First, that you think through alternatives ahead of time so that you have something to fall back on if and when things go wrong. Second, that you build into the decision the responsibility for bailing it out, instead of going in and arguing about who made what mistakes.

Drucker, Peter F. 1990. Managing the Non-Profit Organization. New York: HarperBusiness, 129.

..much of what we regard as reliable, foreseeable, and stable is so obviously a result of formally organized effort that it is readily believed that organized effort is normally successful, that failure of organizations is abnormal...

But in fact, successful cooperation in or by formal organizations is the abnormal, not the normal, condition. What are observed from day to day are the successful survivors among innumerable failures. The organizations commanding sustained attention, almost all of which are short-lived at best, are the exceptions, not the rule.

Barnard, Chester I. 1968. Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. The Functions of the Executive, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 4-5.

A decision-maker can't respond to information he or she doesn't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information.

Meadows, Donella. 2002. Dancing with Systems, The Systems Thinker, 13 (2), 4.

.. clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is first some .. clarity in the designer's mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to find some sort of pattern in them.

Alexander, Christopher. 1964. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 15.

A good theory [is] one that lasts long enough to get you to a better one... In the meantime, there is the wonder and the glory of the search itself.

Wilber, Ken. 2001. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, xiii.

All the first-rate decision makers I've observed, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a very simple rule: If you have consensus on an important matter, don't make the decision. Adjourn it so that everybody has a little time to think. Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

Because it is essential in an effective discussion to understand what it is really about, there has to be dissent and disagreement. If you make a decision by acclamation, it is almost bound to be made on the apparent symptoms rather than on the real issue. You need dissent; but you have to make it productive.

Drucker, Peter F. 1990. Managing the Nonprofit Organization. New York: HarperBusiness, 124.

According to Dr. Phillip Harter of Stanford University School of Medicine. If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of only 100 people, it would look something like this:

There would be:

Wilber, Ken. 2001. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 57.

Making well-thought-out changes in living systems is a dangerous business. Fixing one part, on one side, is likely to produce new and worse pathological events miles away on the other. The most dangerous of all courses is to begin doing things without recognizing the existence of a system.

Thomas, Lewis. 1992. The Fragile Species. New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 82.

"Cheshire Puss," she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. "Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where --" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"-- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Carroll, Lewis. 1904. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, Chapter 6.

Financial measures such as return on investment (ROI) have become for many organizations the only measure of success. Financial managers, relying exclusively on periodic financial statements for their view of the firm, become isolated from the real value-creating operations of the organization and fail to recognize when the accounting numbers are no longer providing relevant or appropriate measures of the organization's operations.

Johnson, H. Thomas, and Robert S. Kaplan. 1987. Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 3.

People dislike unexpected outcomes and surprises. Because of that, they sometimes make situations worse...

We suspect that the inability to manage the unexpected lies behind a number of the pressing problems that executives face. Problems, after all, occur either when something that we expected to happen fails to happen or something that we did not expect to happen does happen.

Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. 2001. Managing the Unexpected, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2.

No one likes a hypocrite, or so the saying goes. A hypocrite professes to live by one set of standards, but acts upon another...

A company, too, can be hypocritical. It may articulate an inspiring vision and set of values, but act on an entirely different set of standards. Unlike the human variety, however, corporate hypocrites are seldom conniving. Rather, they simply lack the integrated set of goals and measures -- the measurement system -- needed to translate vision and values into actions that will move the company in the right direction.

Gouillart, Francis J., and James N. Kelly. 1995. Transforming the Organization, New York: McGraw-Hill, 69.

Ideas are free. They are also an abundant, probably an infinite, resource. Any parent who has left a two-year-old alone for a few minutes knows that coming up with ideas is an innately human trait that requires no special training or education; it's the organized development of constructive ideas that is a management challenge.

Stewart, Thomas A. 1997. Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, New York: Doubleday/Currency, 84.

BURN'S HOG-WEIGHING METHOD

Burns, Robert. Scottish poet (1759-96).

The real difficulty lies not in making the right choices, but in making sure that all the participants ask themselves the right questions. A problem well asked and shared by those concerned is already half solved. This is exactly what Michel Crozier meant when he said, "The problem is the problem!"

Godet, Michel, Régine Monti, Francis Meunier and Fabrice Roubelat. 1999. 2nd Edition. Scenarios and Strategies: A Toolbox for Scenario Planning, Laboratory for Investigation in Prospective and Strategy Working Papers, special issue 2nd edition, April.

Fed a steady diet of numbers and charts from the comfort of their conference room chairs, senior executives experience only a desiccated version of the powerful forces that shape and grow their organizations.

Mistaking these two-dimensional reflections for reality, they shadowbox their way through complex decisions, unwittingly jostled in one direction or another by self-interested emissaries, who can spin a tale of threat and opportunity as skillfully as any Hollywood screenwriter.

Kaplan, Jerry. 1994. Start Up: A Silicon Valley Adventure, New York: Penguin Books, 268-9.

The 14" rule: The 14" distance between head and heart is the longest trip in town, either direction. Leaders bridge it.

Stevens, Gregg. 2001. Personal Communication. Senior Associate, Booz-Allen & Hamilton.

The intuitive resolution of contemporary design problems simply lies beyond a single individual's integrative grasp.

Of course there are no definite limits to this grasp (especially in view of the rare cases where an exceptional talent breaks all bounds). But if we look at the lack of organization and lack of clarity of the forms around us, it is plain that their design has often taxed their designer's cognitive capacity well beyond the limit.

Alexander, Christopher. 1964. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 5.

Proust titled the final volume of his lifework 'The Past Recaptured.' But, of course, the past cannot be recaptured. Memory is overlaid with later memory, mangled by self-justification and self-pity, guarded by self-interest, rent by great gaps of forgetfulness.

Proust did not recapture his past, but reconstructed it, marvelously, with an insight he most surely did not have as he lived it.

Simon, H.A. 1996. Models of My Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, xv.

If you want to change how people think, give them a tool the use of which will lead them to think differently.

Fuller, B. 1976. Synergetics: The Geometry of Thinking. New York: MacMillian.

Shall we dare to ask the question -- how sustainable is a world which promotes strident and unabated leaps of development of some parts of the world, and which perpetuates and, even exacerbates, the underdevelopment and accompanying poverty and disease in other parts of the world?

Moosa, Mohammed Valli (Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Republic of South Africa). 2001. Towards Earth Summit 2002. Network 2002, 1(X).

There is a new way for companies to approach the social sector: not as an object of charity but as an opportunity for learning and business development, supported by R&D and operating funds rather than philanthropy.

Moss Kanter, Rosabeth. 1999. From Spare Change to Real Change: The Social Sector as Beta Site for Business Innovation, Harvard Business Review, 77 (3), 132.

A GE Capital Banker..: "Everybody in this firm knows how to make a spreadsheet sit up and beg. So it should come as no surprise that our biggest arguments are almost always around our different assumptions.... More often than not, our arguments are about ideology. Some of us honestly believe that a particular business or industry can only grow so fast or be priced so high. The models reflect our assumptions. When the models disagree, it usually means our assumptions disagree."

Schrage, Michael. 2000. Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 52.

When asked what single event was most helpful in developing the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is reported to have answered, "Figuring out how to think about the problem."

Wurman, Richard Saul. 1998. Information Anxiety, San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, i.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Heinlein, Robert A. 1995. The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 17.

Computer simulations (of organizations) have a propensity for luring researchers into Bonini's paradox -- the more realistic and detailed one's model, the more the model resembles the modeled organization, including resemblance in the directions of incomprehensibility and indescribability.

Starbuck, W.H. 1976. Organizations and Their Environments, in M.D. Dunnette (ed.), Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago: Rand, 1101.

The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has problems that cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.

Albert Einstein, cited from Nattrass, Brian and Mary Altomare. The Natural Step for Business, Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 9.

To quote Richard Rumelt, "One person's strategy is another's tactics -- that what is strategic depends on where you sit." It also depends on when you sit, because what seemed tactical yesterday might prove strategic tomorrow.

Mintzberg, Henry. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, New York: The Free Press, 27.

Although simple in concept, the mere recognition that stakeholder and firm interests do diverge is as important a step toward managing stakeholders as is identifying and classifying those interests.

Frooman, Jeff. 1999. Stakeholder Influence Strategies, Academy of Management Review, 24(2), 191-205.

In the economy of the future, dynamic decision-making in complex systems will become more and more important. Given the marked improvement in the capabilities of information technology, it is economically feasible to present decision makers with new information formatted in new ways... Human-computer interface design techniques can be used to reduce the difficulties people have in dealing with complex systems.

Howie, Edward, Sharleen Sy, Louisa Ford, and Kim J. Vicente. 2000. Human-Computer Interface Design Can Reduce Misperceptions of Feedback, System Dynamics Review, 16 (3), 151-171.

Many complain about their memory, few about their judgment.

La Rochefoucauld, cf. Russo, J.E. and JP.J.H. Schoemaker. 1989. Decision Traps, New York: Simon & Schuster, 119.

A formal system of cooperation requires an objective, a purpose, an aim ... It is important to note the complete distinction between the aim of a cooperative effort and that of an individual.

Even in the case where a man enlists the aid of other men to do something which he cannot do alone, such as moving a stone, the objective ceases to be personal. It is an objective of the group efforts, from the results of which satisfactions accrue to the members of the group.

Barnard, Chester I. 1968. Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. The Functions of the Executive, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 42-43.

When a system is set up to accomplish some goal, a new entity has come into being--the system itself. No matter what the "goal" of the system, it immediately begins to exhibit systems-behavior, that is, to act according to the general laws that govern the operation of all systems. Now the system itself has to be dealt with. Whereas before there was only the Problem --such as warfare between nations, or garbage collection--there is now an additional universe of problems associated with the functioning or merely the presence of the new system.

Gall, John. 1986. Systemantics: The Underground Text of Systems Lore -- How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, Ann Arbor, MI: The General Systemantics Press, 13.

Some of the people driving us all hard into the future on the back of new technologies appear to assume that if we all focus hard enough on information, then we will get where we want to go most directly. This central focus inevitably pushes aside all the fuzzy stuff that lies around the edges--context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources.

But this stuff around the edges is not as irrelevant as it may seem. It provides valuable balance and perspective. It holds alternatives, offers breadth of vision, and indicates choices. It helps clarify purpose and support meaning. Indeed, ultimately it is only with the help of what lies beyond it that any sense can be made of the information that absorbs so much attention.

Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 2000. The Social Life of Information, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1.

How does it come about that things turn out so differently from what common sense would expect?

Gall, John. 1986. Systemantics: The Underground Test of Systems Lore -- How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, Ann Arbor, MI: The General Systemantics Press, 1.

Values are what we care about. As such, values should be the driving force for our decisionmaking. They should be the basis for the time and effort we spend thinking about decisions. But this is not the way it is. It is not even close to the way it is.

Keeney, Ralph L. 1992. Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3.

Without an integrating structure, information remains a hodgepodge of fragments. Without an organizing structure, knowledge is a mere collection of observations, practices, and conflicting incidents.

Forrester, Jay W. 1990. Principles of Systems, Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1-2.

All too often, 'proactiveness' is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the 'enemy out there,' we are reacting -- regardless of what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.

Senge, Peter. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday/Currency: New York, 21.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, Paul Hawken argues, the problem we face is not so much a management problem as a design problem. "In order to approximate a sustainable society," he concludes, "we need to describe a system of commerce and production in which each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative."