Oz Principle Quotes

I believe that if one person is watching a huge calamity, let’s say a conflagration, a fire, there are always three principle options. 1. Run away, as far away and as fast as you can and let those who cannot run burn. 2. Write a very angry letter to the editor of your paper demanding that the responsible people be removed from office with disgrace. Or, for that matter, launch a demonstration. 3. Bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don’t have a bucket, bring a glass, and if you don’t have a glass, use a teaspoon, everyone has a teaspoon. And yes, I know a teaspoon is little and the fire is huge but there are millions of us and each one of us has a teaspoon. Now I would like to establish the Order of the Teaspoon. People who share my attitude, not the run away attitude, or the letter attitude, but the teaspoon attitude – I would like them to walk around wearing a little teaspoon on the lapel of their jackets, so that we know that we are in the same movement, in the same brotherhood, in the same order, The Order of the Teaspoon.

After an hour of blather, I started to understand Tyler Durden. Human interaction to him was a program. Behavior was determined by frames and congruence and state and validation and other big-chunk psychological principles. And he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz: the little guy behind the curtain, pulling the strings that made everyone around him think he was a big and powerful master of the realm. I

But even in the worst of such circumstances, people can’t move forward if they just sit around feeling powerless and blaming others for their misery.

Remember, getting stuck in the victim cycle is not bad, it’s just not effective. It keeps you from getting results.

Since no one individual can mandate a perfectly accurate description of reality, you must draw from many other people's perceptions to imbue your reality with the deepest possible understanding of its many hues and shades.

left uncorrected in an organization, victim attitudes can erode productivity, competitiveness, morale, and trust to the point that correction becomes so difficult and expensive that the organization can never fully heal itself

When bad things unexpectedly happen, as they always do, or when serious errors in judgment occur, as they do more often than most of us wish to admit, accountable companies and their executives take action to control the damage and set a new course for achieving results.

A thin line separates success from failure, the great companies from the ordinary ones. Below that line lies excuse making, blaming others, confusion, and an attitude of helplessness, while above that line we find a sense of reality, ownership, commitment, solutions to problems, and determined action. While losers languish Below The Line, preparing stories that explain why past efforts went awry, winners reside Above The Line, powered by commitment and hard work.

success springs not from some new-fangled fad, paradigm, process, or program but from the willingness of an organization’s people to embrace full accountability for the results they seek.

The world’s societies suffer from the current cult of victimization because its subtle dogma holds that circumstances and other people prevent you from achieving your goals.

Always solicit and strive to understand perspectives other than your own.

from the willingness of an organization’s people to embrace full accountability for the results they seek.

people must abandon the past-oriented, blame-centered who-done-it definition of accountability.

Accountability: “A personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results—to See It, Own It, Solve It, and Do It.

It should come as no surprise that the real value and benefit of accountability stems from a person’s or an organization’s ability to influence events and outcomes before they happen.

The message: Sometimes you must be willing to burn all your other ships and grasp the helm of the one under your command. Doing so can stimulate the conviction and create the ownership necessary to get started on a new program of action that will help you rise above your circumstances.

I n the last chapter, we described some basic principles underlying discernment of God's will—committing ourselves to God first, committing ourselves to getting to heaven, and accepting God's revelation on his terms. These basic principles belong on the objective side of the ledger in discernment. Perhaps we can understand them as the bones of a vertebrate animal—they provide the structure. But these bones need flesh, blood, a heart, and a brain. Unlike Dorothy's traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz, we already possess them.

What else can I do to achieve the result?

It seems ironic that, in this information age, millions of people feel such a lack of control over their lives. Obviously, the communications revolution has done little to overcome, and may even have contributed to, a feeling of detachment and disconnectedness with circumstances and other people.

Staying conscious means overcoming the auto-pilot mode and paying attention to everything that may relate to potential solutions, particularly those things that we take for granted or that we have come to accept as "the way we do things around here." Always challenge current assumptions and beliefs in an effort to break through to a new level of thinking that may take you out of your comfort zone.

Jim Collins describes superior work environments this way: “When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.” We

Management wizard Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last, argues that what must glaringly separate great companies from mediocre ones is the latter’s tendency “to explain away the brutal facts rather than to confront the brutal facts head-on.

at AES, the builder and operator of electricity-producing cogeneration plants, CEO Roger Sant implemented a “they busters” campaign with all the necessary buttons, posters, and flyers to help workers stop blaming the elusive “they” who always seem to stifle results. “They” represent all the finger-pointing, denying, ignoring, pretending, and waiting habits that grow up in organizations and keep people from taking charge of their own destinies.

While losers languish Below The Line, preparing stories that explain why past efforts went awry, winners reside Above The Line, powered by commitment and hard work.

To get Above The Line, and out of the blame game, you must climb the Steps To Accountability by adopting See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It attitudes.

Whatever the wording, all our justifications for failure focus on “why it can’t be done,” rather than on “what else I can do.” To

As accountability deepens and people move Above The Line within the organization, a shift occurs from “tell me what to do,” to “here is what I am going to do, what do you think?”—a truly profound and empowering approach to getting results.