Organisational Culture Quotes

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.

Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance

Telling people what to do is showmanship. Showing people how to do it is leadership.

I’m done with all the stupid shit. I’m done with politicians, the rich taxing the poor. I’m done with organised religions, profiting off their prophets. I’m done with pop culture, making everything consumable. I’m done, I’m done, I’m done

When your team member makes a request, take it seriously. Those who make an effort of asking cares about your organisation, those who don't ask don't care.

It is very unprofessional for a professional to declare another professional an unprofessional without professional expertise.

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

Any place where women are not respected or provided enough opportunities to grow and develop, cannot be a progressive place.

Rethink Your Success Mindset: Times are getting tougher. We need tougher mindsets to ensure that we go beyond survive to thrive.

Even the best Mindset will become contaminated and eventually blunted in a toxic organisational culture.

A leaders job is to ELEVATE the team, not delegate the team. Elevate your team to take initiative because real leadership is when you can create a culture of self-leadership within your team

An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power - or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness - a similar distinction?

This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organisational change management process that meets two key objectives, one being the company culture, and the other one is empowering its employees

Structurally, by reason of their smaller numbers and greater resources, virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in their capacity for collective action. Their internal lines of communication are more compact; their wealth offers an all-purpose medium of power, convertible into any number of forms of domination; their intelligence systems scan the political landscape from a greater height. More numerous and more dispersed, less equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be ‘organisationally outflanked'.

Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes: the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness; how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour. We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible. Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful, but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with. A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased. Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too. Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.

The workplace is the birthplace of a country’s culture.

Organised effort is produced through the coordination of effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite end, in a spirit of harmony.

ReThink culture, because it is the foundation of all strategic success.

Strategy has no value if your culture and leadership mindset are wrong

Rethink Your Success Mindset: With the right mindset, everything that you experience, along your journey towards success, is a blessing.

Rethink Your Success Mindset: Gratitude is the attitude, fuel and catalyst that transforms life's challenges into wisdom.

There is no such thing as time management. There is only the mindset that optimally manages the self and its actions.

We now live in a time when PEOPLE and profits must become equally valuable in the corporate leaders Mindset. Rethink your Leadership Culture to become a conscious, high performance organisation

Aucun changement fonctionnel ou structurel ne peut garantir une société parfaitement démocratique. Nous acceptons mal ce fait parce que nous avons été élevés dans une culture technologique où l'on pense généralement que, si on pouvait seulement trouver le bon instrument, tou irait enfin pour le mieux et qu'il serait alors possible de se relâcher un peu. Mais on ne peut jamais se relâcher. L'expérience des Noirs américains, comme celle des Indiens, des femmes, des Hispaniques et des pauvres, nous apprend cela. Nulle constitution, nulle déclaration des droits, nul système électoral, nulle loi ne peuvent garantir la paix, la justice et l'égalité. Tout cela exige un combat permanent, des débats incessants impliquant l'ensemble des citoyens et un nombre infini d'organisations et de mouvements qui imposent leur pression sur tous les systèmes établis.

culture lays the emphasis on aesthetics, on beauty; civilization promotes ethics, moral goodness. One is intensely creative and fosters individualism, the other seeks to preserve and organise the creations of the parent culture.

I have more than 6670 employees spread across the length and breadth of the country who live and experience the brand 'Bajaj Allianz' everyday. I'd like to believe that these people are the company's most valued brand ambassadors.

To all my friends who constantly talk disparagingly about the supposed 'homosexual lifestyle' and stereotype gay people and the community, I'd like to get this straight. There are essentially two worlds – the 'gay scene' and the gay (or LGBTIQ) community. The 'scene' is like the tip of the iceberg; what is seen by others because it is visible on a street, suburb or pride parade. Like the ninety percent of the submerged iceberg, the community is larger and less visible. It consists of organisations, groups, support networks and also gay and lesbian singles and couples living 'normal' lives in the suburbs. Occasionally there is an overlap but not often. Some live, socialise and work in both. Many never enter each others worlds. The values, lifestyles and culture of these two worlds are as different as Asian culture is to western is to African is to Middle Eastern. Dig down even deeper below the surface and you find it is not a single community but diverse communities and subcultures that are separate but not necessarily divided. The common thing that binds them together is their experience of inequality, discrimination and their desire to make a better world for themselves, others and future generations. If you believe that all gays and lesbians are shallow and obsessed with sex, body image, partying, nightclubs and bars then you are obviously an observer from the outside or mixing in the wrong circles.

As if to demonstrate the possibilities of socialism, the People's Republic of China not only survived but is prospering just when the productive decrepitude of capitalism is more apparent than ever, its imperial offer unable to obtain submission and its military power unable to compel it, only to rain destruction on societies that are the targets - such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria - or proxies - such as Ukraine today - in vain efforts to do so. Against this background, Chinese and other persisting socialisms demonstrate to increasingly interested publics worldwide, particularly amid the pandemic and the war, that there are saner ways to organise society, material production, politics and culture as well as a society's relations with nature and other societies.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals. Now I mean, people are trying to do something, but I think it’s not publish or perish, it’s publish in the okay places [or perish]. And this has assembled a most ridiculous group of people. I wrote a column for many years in the nineties, in a journal called Current Biology. In one article, “Hard Cases”, I campaigned against this [culture] because I think it is not only bad, it’s corrupt. In other words it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really have no reason to exercise judgment at all. And that’s all been done in the aid of commerce, because they are now giant organisations making money out of it.

Ma langue maternelle fut une langue infirme. Ce patois judéo-arabe de Tunis, truffé de mots hébreux, italiens, français, mal compris des Musulmans, totalement ignoré des autres, m'abondonnais dès que je quittais les ruelles du ghetto. Au-delà des émotions simples, du boire et du manger, dans cet univers politique, technique et intellectuel que je rêvais de conquérir, il perdait tout efficacité. Par bonheur, l'école primaire me fit don du français. C'était un cadeau intimidant, exigeant et difficile à manier; c'était en outre la langue du Colonisateur. Mais précisément, ce superbe instrument, magnifiquement au point, exprimait tout et ouvrait toutes les portes. Le degré de culture, le prestige intellectuel, la réussite sociale se mesurait à l'assurance dans le maniement de la langue du vainqueur. J'acceptai joyeusement le pari et l'enjeu: avec ma mère, qui ne comprenait pas le français,je parlerais la langue de mon enfance; dans la rue, dans ma profession, je serais un Occidental. C'était affaire d'organisation intérieure. Après tout, je ne serais pas le seul homme sur terre à ne pas connaitre une parfaite unité.

Scientists will discover a weak correlation between A and B, assuming C under D conditions. The university PR office will then post something for immediate release: ‘Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (under certain conditions)’. News organisations will pick it up and publish, ‘A causes B, say scientists’, which will then be read by The Internets and turned into ‘A causes B - ALL THE TIME!’ Which will then be picked up by TV shows that run stories like ‘A ... A Killer Among Us??’ All of this eventually leads to your grandma getting all weird about A.

Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind — the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers.

Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee efficient, accurate and convenient data processing. That requires methods of organisation like catalogues, methods of reproduction like photocopy machines, methods of rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms, and pedantic (but hopefully cheerful) librarians who know how to use these tools. Inventing such methods proved to be far more difficult than inventing writing. Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They obviously had no computers or photocopying machines, but they did have catalogues, and far more importantly, they did create special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.

Idealism, particularly idealism of a cultural or artistic kind, has become such a rare phenomenon in the contemporary world that it may often be hard for us to feel our way into the spiritual background of much of the art, music, and literature that burst upon an unsuspecting European public in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. It has become fashionable to suppose that what we have come to term variously “modern art”, “modern music”, or simply “modernism” took its origins in some collective artistic rejection of the styles and norms of the past, and in an adoption of a sceptical and anti-idealistic world view. While it is true that the “iconoclastic” movements of expressionism, futurism, dada, and early surrealism relied for much of their public impact on shock-tactics and a philosophy of ‘making it new’, a close study of their artistic programmes shows that their primary concern was less the destruction of the past than the reinterpretation of both past and present in terms of a visionary future, a hoped-for world in which the artist, like some divinely inspired child, would endow mankind with a new innocence, exorcising from it the demons of war, revolution, technology, and social organisation. Such a transformed humanity would be a worthy successor to the mankind of previous ages

Sexually loaded terms like 'bastard child', virgin and promiscuous are therefore meaningless when decoupled from their roots in the organisation of reproduction, since it is woman who gives birth and thereby channels male inheritance and surname from father to son. She bears the cultural burden of sexuality precisely due to the lethal mixture of biology and patriarchy; of being the one who gives birth and thereby the one who the result of sexual intercourse stays with, while the man leaves it behind, while at the same time not having the power to decide anything about the offspring. Carrying the future but not having a say about it, such is woman's predicament under patriarchy.

Dotcom believes one of the reasons he was targeted was his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He says he was compelled to reach out to the site after US soldier Bradley Manning leaked documents to it. The infamous video recording of the Apache gunship gunning down a group of Iraqis (some of whom, despite widespread belief to the contrary, were later revealed to have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, was the trigger. “Wow, this is really crazy,” Dotcom recalls thinking, watching the black-and-white footage and hearing the operators of the helicopter chat about firing on the group. He made a €20,000 donation to Wikileaks through Megaupload’s UK account. “That was one of the largest donations they got,” he says. According to Dotcom, the US, at the time, was monitoring Wikileaks and trying better to understand its support base. “My name must have popped right up.” The combination of a leaking culture and a website dedicated to producing leaked material would horrify the US government, he says. A willing leaker and a platform on which to do it was “their biggest enemy and their biggest fear . . . If you are in a corrupt government and you know how much fishy stuff is going on in the background, to you, that is the biggest threat — to have a site where people can anonymously submit documents.” Neil MacBride was appointed to the Wikileaks case, meaning Dotcom shares prosecutors with Assange. “I think the Wikileaks connection got me on the radar.” Dotcom believes the US was most scared of the threat of inspiration Wikileaks posed. He also believes it shows just how many secrets the US has hidden from the public and the rest of the world. “That’s why they are going after that so hard. Only a full transparent government will have no corruption and no back door deals or secret organisations or secret agreements. The US is the complete opposite of that. It is really difficult to get any information in the US, so whistleblowing is the one way you can get to information and provide information to the public.

You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration ‘from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which “have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law’.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a half-hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilisation for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilisation?

Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.

After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed – this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script – revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four

Human Resources management is a skill ingrained with an art to execute.

You’ll also note a chronology to the theories, with later ones tending to supersede earlier ones. It is not, however, an exact timeline; bits and pieces of various theories still hold sway among current thinkers and some older ideas, such as trait theory, have resurfaced with renewed vigour in the light of modern science (genetic studies show that some traits associated with leaders, such as intelligence and extroversion, are highly heritable). One consequence of the chronological approach is that earlier leadership studies tend to focus on political and military figures, whereas the rise of corporate culture in the twentieth century shifts the focus of later theories to leadership in the workplace (which can be termed organisational, management or business psychology). In the corporate sphere, ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ become ‘managers’ and ‘employees’ or ‘subordinates’.

The truth is that digital transformation is actually not about adapting to new technology at all — it's about directing an organisation to be more adaptive to change itself.

A person can be physically present, apparently part of an organisation, a community or culture. In reality, however, they feel far away, alienated, outsiders, temporary visitors.

Il ne s'agit pas ici de faire le procès, encore moins l'éloge de la colonisation européenne de l'Afrique, mais simplement de marquer que cette colonisation comporte, comme presque tous les phénomènes qui résultent des chocs de civilisation, un actif et un passif culturels. Ce n'est pas prendre la défense de la colonisation, de ses laideurs, voire de ses atrocités ou de ses indéniables bouffonneries (achat de vastes territoires contre quelques rouleaux d'étoffe ou un peu d'alcool), que d'admettre que le choc en a été souvent décisif et même finalement bénéfique pour les structures sociales, économiques et culturelles des peuples noirs colonisés. En fait, ç'a été, au lendemain de l'acte final du Congrès de Berlin (1885), la dernière très grande aventure de l'expansion européenne. Et si cette mise sous tutelle tardive a été de brève durée (moins d'un siècle), la rencontre s'est faite à vive allure, alors que l'Europe et l'économie mondiale se trouvaient en plein essor. C'est une société industrielle adulte, exigeante, disposant de moyens modernes d'action et de communication, qui a heurté et investi le monde noir. Et celui-ci est réceptif, plus mobile que les ethnographes ne le supposaient hier encore, capable de saisir des objets et des formes que l'Occident lui propose et, surtout, de les réinterpréter, de les charger de sens nouveau, de les lier, chaque fois que la chose est possible, aux impératifs de sa culture traditionnelle. [...] En parlant d'un certain actif de la colonisation, nous ne pensons pas à ces biens purement matériels, routes, voies ferrées, ports, barrages, à ces mises en marche d'exploitations du sol et du sous-sol que les colonisateurs ont installés dans des buts hautement intéressés. Ce legs, aussi important qu'il paraisse parfois, serait de peu d'utilité et éminemment périssable si les héritiers n'avaient aussi acquis, au cours de la pénible épreuve de la colonisation, de quoi leur en permettre aujourd'hui l’utilisation rationnelle. L'enseignement, un certain niveau de la technique, de l'hygiène, de la médecine, de l'administration publique, sont les meilleurs biens légués par les colonisateurs, la contrepartie positive aux destructions opérées par le contact européen dans les vielles habitudes tribales, familiales, sociales, sur lesquelles reposaient toute l'organisation et toute la culture.

In pre-Indira Gandhi days the IB was basically guided by the ‘ear marking’ scheme. This scheme enabled the IB to earmark certain IPS officers while they were under training in the Police Academy. They were earmarked on the basis of their performance in the All India Services Examination, performance in the academy and confidential reports on their shaping up process. A number of brilliant officers, including the illustrious Directors like Hari Anand Barari, M. K. Narayanan, and V. G. Vaidya were inducted through the earmarking scheme. The humble author of this book was also an earmarked officer. Of course, some officers also were inducted on ‘deputation’ from state cadres. They were later absorbed as ‘hard core’ officers. This system was abandoned after 1970 to accommodate ‘loyal and committed officers’ and also to bring the IB at par with other Central Police Organisations (CPO), like the CRPF, BSF. The IB was opened up as a waiting room for IPS officers from the less glamorous state cadres like Manipur and Tripura, Assam, West Bengal and any other state where the prevailing political culture did not suit certain officers. They used the IB to cool off and to catch up with other opportunities.

*THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential* The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so. Think of how a village community might manage its only freshwater well and its nearby forest, or how Internet users worldwide collaboratively curate Wikipedia. Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth's 'common pool' resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community's language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge. ...In the 1970s, the little-known political scientist Elinor Ostrom started seeking out real-life examples of natural commons to find out what made them work - and she went on to win a Nobel-Memorial prize for what she discovered. Rather than being left 'open access', those successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them...she realised, the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth's resources... The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy. (p.82-3)

My absence would hardly be conspicuous anyway since it was going to be a big day in many places that day due to the fact that all kinds of events had been organised all over the country so that all sorts of people could discover and participate in the cultural life in their particular region. That being the case, since I appear to be a very culturally oriented sort of person, it is perfectly plausible that I was already under enormous pressure to negotiate a riveting panoply of worthy ventures further afield.

Customer service must be non-negotiable in every workplace. Every organisation will come cross customers.

Customer service is vital. How do we turn PAIN points into opportunities for BROWNIE points.

As a service excellence provider, I always think about how to turn a customer's pain point into brownie points. Never underestimate the power of any customer transaction

Organisational Culture is the generalised mindset that guides your people to live out the company purpose. It strongly influences how your people deliver on your brand promise to internal and external customers. Because of this impact, a clear understanding of your corporate culture is vital, as it's your performance booster, or limiter, in servicing your clients.

Good one! Either hire the right person for the job and use their services or hire anyone and train them to do your bidding and that may not necessarily be the right one or the smart one. Bureaucratic-automated work culture festers poor leadership that exhibits the lack of routed efforts towards identifying the right person for the right job through the myriad nuances and subtleties of employee profiles/candidature, resulting in a manifest crack in organizational competence and dislodges itself from organizational goals.

Either hire the right person for the job and use their services or hire anyone and train them to do your bidding and that may not necessarily be the right move or the smart move. Bureaucratic-automated work culture festers poor leadership that exhibits the lack of routed efforts towards identifying the right person for the right job through the myriad nuances and subtleties of employee profiles/candidature, resulting in a manifest crack in organizational competence and dislodges itself from organizational goals.

The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals. [...] In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.

The organisations are passing through a vale of tears, and for once, it is not entirely the fault of leadership. So where do we go from here?

It is necessary to be clear what we mean by "culture", so that we may be clear about the distinction between the material organisation of Europe and the spiritual organism of Europe. If the latter dies, what you will organise will not be Europe, but merely a mass of human beings speaking different languages. And there will be no longer any justification for their continuing to speak different languages, for they will no longer have anything to say which cannot be said equally well in any language.

Resilience versus Robustness. Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering. For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.

Management by objective (MBO) which means purposeful leadership to achieve a strategic objective is one of the keys to successful airline management. MBO is also referred to as Management by Results – MBR. This is a system where subordinates coordinate with their superiors to achieve the desired objective. Under this principle, the goals of the organization are linked to employee goals. Management objectives are made to meet operational objectives. And both management and operational objectives are made to achieve organizational long-term objectives. Organisational objectives are linked to the vision and mission of the organisation. The team is made aware of the achievable goals of the organization and unified effort is exerted in that direction; on the other hand, the employee whose performance is noteworthy will be rewarded by the organization. This builds a transparent and clean work culture on one hand and the other unclogs communication blocks.

As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life. It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.

Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.

The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it's one of the most glaringly obvious cases. .... As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people always seem to have to the other, always centring themselves in every narrative, is a very bid problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga. If white people spent more time humanising themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity a well. This means not treating us like we're the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy of the very definitions that were created by white people. All black, indigenous, and other people of colour deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy. If you're a white person who profits off of yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment, find trusted organisations and give at least a quarter of what you make on work in India.

In June 1949, the Koreans who previously had belonged to the Japanese Communist Party migrated en masse into the newly created Korean Workers’ Party, as the North Korean communist party was called. Like its counterparts all over the world, the KWP showed a formidable knack for creating associations with the allure of democracy and openness to the public. There were women’s associations, movements for the defence of culture and peace, sports clubs, and various other groups which the Party could influence from the shadows. My grandmother was among the Party’s most active organisers and eventually became director for the Kyoto region.

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In terms of organisational models and human relationship models, humankind has not evolved much over the last millennia.

In fact, the brain is the best and most efficient organisational structure known in nature. Each element – each neuron – has the same constituency, but its level of influence varies dynamically according to the function of a specific movement. Every neuron is equally important in the fulfilment of their common mission of governing our lives

It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly? To truly leverage the potential of this information age, we need to rethink and redesign organisations

Abolishing hierarchies thus means that people would not have set roles or tasks, but rather that these are in line with their skills and the necessary performance at a given time

The “moderate”, “progressive”, “liberal Christians”, “concerned with social justice and the protection of the environment”, who see the Gospel simply as a 'Handbook' for 'Moral Guidance’, and the divinity of Christ as a cause of embarrassment, an unnecessary occasion of disagreement with atheists and people of other faiths, have reduced the Church to a campaigning force for social justice, indistinguishable from secular organisations, de facto annulling the social, cultural and political relevance of Christianity.   It’s

The one who meets us as herald of the Jubilee of God's reign does so in the particular historical, social, and economic circumstances of his time, just as we are responsible for recognising and responding to the same message in the midst of our own historical and cultural particularity. The message is no safe one, confined to an otherworldly or religious sphere of life, but rather strikes us now, as it did those who first heard it, in the midst of the institutions and assumptions by which our lives are organised.

As a minimum, the following areas should be considered: The stakeholders. The budget. The future direction and current culture of the organisation. The baseline Architecture Landscape. The current processes used for change and operation of IT. The skills and capabilities of the people within the enterprise.

From 'Creating True Peace' by Thich Nhat Hanh To better understand the practise of protection, please study the Five Mindfulness Trainings in Chapter 3, particularly the third, sexual responsibility. By practising the Third Mindfulness Training, we protect ourselves, our family, and society. In addition, by observing all the trainings we learn to eat in moderation, to work mindfully, and to organise our daily life so we are there for others. This can bring us great happiness and restore our peace and balance. Expressing Sexual Feelings with Love and Compassion Animals automatically follow their instincts, but humans are different. We do not need to satisfy our cravings the way animals do. We can decide that we will have sex only with love. In this way we can cultivate the deepest love, harmony, and nonviolence. For humans, to engage only in nonviolent sexuality means to have respect for each other. The sexual act can be a sacred expression of love and responsibility. The Third Mindfulness Training teaches us that the physical expression of love can be beautiful and transcendent. If you have a sexual relationship without love and caring, you create suffering for both yourself and your partner, as well as for your family and our entire society. In a culture of peace and nonviolence, civilised sexual behaviour is an important protection. Such love is not sheer craving for sex, it is true love and understanding. Respecting Our Commitments To engage in a sexual act without understanding or compassion is to act with violence. It is an act against civilization. Many people do not know how to handle their bodies or their feelings. They do not realise that an act of only a few minutes can destroy the life of another person. Sexual exploitation and abuse committed against adults and children is a heavy burden on society. Many families have been broken by sexual misconduct. Children who grow up in such families may suffer their entire lives, but if they get an opportunity to practise, they can transform their suffering. Otherwise, when they grow up, they may follow in the footsteps of their parents and cause more suffering, especially to those they love. We know that the more one engages in sexual misconduct, the more one suffers. We must come together as families to find ways to protect our young people and help them live a civilised life. We need to show our young people that happiness is possible without harmful sexual conduct. Teenage pregnancy is a tragic problem. Teens are not yet mature enough to understand that with love comes responsibility. When a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old boy and girl come together for sexual intercourse, they are just following their natural instincts. When a girl gets pregnant and gives birth at such a young age, her parents also suffer greatly. Public schools throughout the United States have nurseries where babies are cared for while their mothers are in the classroom. The young father and mother do not even know yet how to take care of themselves - how can they take care of another human being? It takes years of maturing to become ready to be a parent.

There seems to be a culture in many organisations of simply holding meetings as a substitute for actually getting on with the job.

Organisations often appoint leaders for their IQ. Then, years later, sack them for their lack of EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Common Purpose argues that in the future they will promote for CQ - Cultural Intelligence.

[On action filled leadership] Telling your team what to do is showmanship. Showing people how to do it is leadership. Leading for the purpose of visual effect will not accomplish the vision.

.....the discourse of the Qur’an-e-Sharif, rich in parable and allegory, metaphor and symbol, has been an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration, lending itself to a wide spectrum of interpretations. This freedom of interpretation is a generosity which the Qur'an confers upon all believers, uniting them in the conviction that All-Merciful Allah will forgive them if they err in their sincere attempts to understand His word. Happily, as a result, the Holy Book continues to guide and illuminate the thought and conduct of Muslims belonging to different communities of interpretation and spiritual affiliation, from century to century, in diverse cultural environments. The Noble Qur’an extends its principle of pluralism also to adherents of other faiths. It affirms that each has a direction and path to which they turn so that all should strive for good works, in the belief that, wheresoever they may be, Allah will bring them together. - His Highness the Aga Khan, The Ismaili Center London, October 19, 2003 ‘Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur’an and its Creative Expressions’ An International Colloquium organised by Institute of Ismaili Studies

But it seems that it is modern medicine in particular that reflects best the religious heritage of our culture: its ideology, myths, dogmas, symbols, beliefs, gestures, practices, hopes and fears. Although it presents itself as rational, i.e. scientific, objective and neutral, its organisation and functioning are typical of religion. Thus, while defining itself as a secular enterprise, medicine is deeply waterlogged with the spirit of the old religion. Even more, for many, medicine becomes a new, secularised religion (Berger 1991; Clerc 2004; Dworkin 2000 [2008]; Szasz 1977; Szczeklik 2012; Tatoń 2003) and takes up its social functions. It is present in people’s life from the womb to the tomb, provides a response to the same fears and angsts of humanity as the Church, and the pursuit of ‘eternal’ health, youth and beauty has substituted the religious zeal for salvation. Medicine’s war on diseases and death is similar to a religious war against sin, as viruses and bacteria have replaced devils and demons, and the structure and functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO) is similar to that of the Church. Physicians have replaced priests and old, religious morality is being substituted by a new moral code: healthism; even though the object of faith and its expression are different, their religious nature persists.

A great business strategy is the leader’s purpose which is a culture by itself. It is a way of communication, operation, decision making, recruitment, marketing and many more. It is the oxygen of the whole organisation not a piece of paper hanged on the walls and no one understands i

If employees are viewed as mere cost factors, they will only do what they are told to do - if employees are treated as thinking and feeling beings, they will care, fight for improvements and voluntarily go the extra mile.

The first step in building trust is to trust a person.

When empathy is present, the tension eases. That is when we can move on.

People with different talents and personalities are a gift. They help us see things from a different perspective and balance out our weaknesses.

Valuing differences is the beginning of leveraging the strengths of each team member.

A sustained state of flow - a psychological state in which a person is completely immersed in an activity, experiencing optimal concentration and performance - is a good indicator that we have found our purpose.

Designing the path to the future generates energy. Contributing to the path generates engagement.

Inspiration leads to a changed mindset. A changed mindset triggers a change in behaviour.

Only what is practiced regularly generates real impact.

When the mindset of the industrial age meets the demands of today’s workplace, profound tensions arise.

Insufficient freedom of action leads to a dull implementation of given guidelines and shuts down the creative parts of our brain. Demotivation follows.

We can grow either through unintentional lessons that life teaches us or through intentional learning experiences that we consciously choose for ourselves.

A turbulent environment awakens the primal fears within us, causing our instincts to call for more control.

Inherently formed feelings and emotions such as employee motivation or trust cannot be imposed or commanded.

Effective learning changes the brain structure which in turn induces the desired behaviour.

Forcing people through pressure brings short-term results at best - in the long run it backfires and the relationship suffers.

A fertile soil, quality seeds, photosynthesis and deep roots make a tree endure. A trusting environment, inspired employees, a learning mentality and anchoring effective behaviours make a High Performing Organisation successful.