Reinventing Organizations Quotes

We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake, a condition that in medical terminology would simply be called cancer.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. John Naisbitt

In a forest, there is no master tree that plans and dictates change when rain fails to fall or when the spring comes early. The whole ecosystem reacts creatively, in the moment.

There is an absolute need for organizations to innovate, grow, transform, and reinvent themselves faster than ever before.

we often speak about “work-life balance”?a notion that shows how little life is left in work

an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Richard Buckminster Fuller

When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return. Emulation and peer pressure regulates the system better than hierarchy ever could.

Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.

The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.

profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live, but we don’t live to breathe.

Life, in all its evolutionary wisdom, manages ecosystems of unfathomable beauty, ever evolving toward more wholeness, complexity, and consciousness.

Extraordinary things begin to happen when we dare to bring all of who we are to work.

Could we invent a more powerful, more soulful, more meaningful way to work together, if only we change our belief system?

as human beings, we are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold.

think like farmers: look 20 years ahead, and plan only for the next day.

With Teal, serving the purpose becomes more important than serving the organization, opening up new possibilities for collaboration across organizational boundaries.

Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility.

The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world.

Taming the fears of the ego Each shift occurs when we are able to reach a higher vantage point from which we see the world in broader perspective. Like a fish that can see water for the first time when it jumps above the surface, gaining a new perspective requires that we disidentify from something we were previously engulfed

Can a middle manager put Teal practices in place for the department he is responsible for?

Nobody thought the direct business model would work. But work it did, and spectacularly. Until it didn’t. And therein lies the tale.

Traditional hierarchies and their plethora of built-in control systems are, at their core, formidable machines that breed fear and distrust.

Self-organization is not a startling new feature of the world. It is the way the world has created itself for billions of years.

the metaphor of the machine indicates that these organizations, however much they brim with activity, can still feel lifeless and soulless.

job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy.

All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance.

Ultimately, both parties are trying to answer one simple, fundamental question: Do we sense that we are meant to journey together?

Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?

When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen.

Having journeyed from inorganic to organic and having considered the handedness of simple monomers, we now take a look at polymers, the next big idea in the story of the past and future of life.

The control experiment of removing other animals than the dominant males was not done because it did not make sense within the whole complex of theory, analogies to individual organisms, and unexamined assumptions

What happened? Stan repeats. To us? To the country? What happened when childhood ends in Dealey Plaza, in Memphis, in the kitchen of the Ambassador, your belief your hope your trust lying in a pool of blood again? Fifty-five thousand of your brothers dead in Vietnam, a million Vietnamese, photos of naked napalmed children running down a dirt road, Kent State, Soviet tanks roll into Prague so you turn on drop out you know you can't reinvent the country but maybe you reimagine yourself you believe you really believe that you can that you can create a world of your own and then you lower that expectation to just a piece of ground to make a stand on but then you learn that piece of ground costs money that you don't have. What happened? Altamont, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Son of Sam, Mark Chapman we saw a dream turn into a nightmare we saw love and peace turn into endless war and violence our idealism into realism our realism into cynicism our cynicism into apathy our apathy into selfishness our selfishness into greed and then greed was good and we Had babies, Ben, we had you and we had hopes but we also had fears we created nests that became bunkers we made our houses baby-safe and we bought car seats and organic apple juice and hired multilingual nannies and paid tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear. What happened? You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a bottle to your cellar, a few extra feet to the sunroom, you see yourself aging and wonder if you've put enough away for that and suddenly you realize that you're frightened of the years ahead of you what Happened? Watergate Irangate Contragate scandals and corruption all around you and you never think you'll become corrupt but time corrupts you, corrupts as surely as gravity and erosion, wears you down wears you out I think, son, that the country was like that, just tired, just worn out by assassinations, wars, scandals, by Ronald Reagan, Bush the First selling cocaine to fund terrorists, a war to protect cheap gas, Bill Clinton and realpolitik and jism on dresses while insane fanatics plotted and Bush the Second and his handlers, a frat boy run by evil old men and then you turn on the TV one morning and those towers are coming down and the war has come home what Happened? Afghanistan and Iraq the sheer madness the killing the bombing the missiles the death you are back in Vietnam again and I could blame it all on that but at the end of the day at the end of the day we are responsible for ourselves. We got tired, we got old we gave up our dreams we taught ourselves to scorn ourselves to despise our youthful idealism we sold ourselves cheap we aren't Who we wanted to be.

Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?

This is how nature has worked for millions of years. Innovation doesn't happen centrally, according to plan, but at the edges, all the time, when some organism senses a change in the environment and experiments to find a response. Some attempts to fail catch on; others rapidly spread to all corners of the ecosystem. Reality is the ultimate reference.

Governments and public sector organizations across the world are trying to balance essential, and often conflicting, demands: to deliver better, more relevant public services centred on the needs of the citizens and businesses they serve; to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of their operations; and to reinvent supply chains to deliver services quickly, cheaply and effectively.

Once you acquire the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, it cannot be taken away from you. In fact, it increases over time. That is why executives and leaders must re-invent themselves before they can re-invent an organization, institution, or country effectively. Without the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, how can they possibly succeed?

There are about 1,800 billionaires in the world as of 2015, with more than $7 trillion between them.58 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) calculated that it would take roughly $30 billion a year to solve world hunger through mostly agricultural development in poor regions. These billionaires could provide this direct aid for 200 years and still have about $550 million each, on average.

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.

Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit is suddenly sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back into the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself. Such twists have prompted the sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry to speak more largely of flexibility as “the end of organized capitalism.

I could show you exactly what I did to create four different, separate multimillion-dollar organizations—and teach you how to do the exact same thing. In twenty minutes. And chances are, it wouldn’t work for you. Why not? Because how to do it is not the issue. Because if we don’t fundamentally change the way you think, then you’ll have rearranged what I said by the time you leave the room. You’ll have reinvented it by the time you go to bed that night, and in the morning you won’t even recognize it as the same information. It’s the same reason diets don’t work. The same reason gym memberships don’t magically make you more fit.

The ceiling is actually the jungle that keeps most people away from the hidden treasure. And if you’re ready to work on the skills category of your Career Savings Account, this is a tremendous gift. Author Seth Godin calls it the “Dip.” He says, “The Dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out. If you took organic chemistry in college, you’ve experienced the Dip. Academia doesn’t want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen. Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can’t handle organic chemistry, well, then you can’t go to med school.”2

But all progressive movements have to beware their own successes. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, but to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking. It happens in all organizations. It is fatal to those who are never confronted by a reckoning that forces them to face up and get wise.

The fall of 2017, one of our leaders, who unbeknownst to us, struggled with alcohol addiction and fell off the wagon on a business trip. He immediately entered rehab. What should we tell his staff? His boss believed that we should follow the Netflix culture and tell everyone the truth. Human Resources insisted that he should have the right to choose what he shared about his personal challenges. In this case, I agreed with HR. When it comes to personal struggles, an individual’s right to privacy trumps an organization’s desire for transparency. Here we didn’t take the most transparent route. But we didn’t spin either. We told everyone that the guy had taken two weeks off for personal reasons. It was up to him to share more details if he chose.

At the same time, Kaufmann discovered that in developing his genetic networks, he had reinvented some of the most avant-garde work in physics and applied mathematics-albeit in a totally new context. The dynamics of his genetic regulatory networks turned out to be a special case of what the physicists were calling "nonlinear dynamics." From the nonlinear point of view, in fact, it was easy to see why his sparsely connected networks could organize themselves into stable cycles so easily: mathematically, their behavior was equivalent to the way all the rain falling on the hillsides around a valley will flow into a lake at the bottom of the valley. In the space of all possible network behaviors, the stable cycles were like basins-or as the physicists put it, "attractors.

The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego. By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life. We can learn to minimize our need to control, to look good, to fit in. We are no longer fused with our ego, and we don’t let its fears reflexively control our lives. In the process, we make room to listen to the wisdom of other, deeper parts of ourselves. What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life. All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance. In Evolutionary-Teal, we cross the chasm and learn to decrease our need to control people and events. We come to believe that even if something unexpected happens or if we make mistakes, things will turn out all right, and when they don’t, life will have given us an opportunity to learn and grow.

Most important of all, ARPA staffers recognized the agency’s biggest mistake yet: It had not been tapping the universities where much of the best scientific work was being done. The scientific community, predictably, rallied to the call for a reinvention of ARPA as a “high-risk, high-gain” research sponsor—the kind of R&D shop they had dreamed of all along. Their dream was realized; ARPA was given its new mission. As ARPA’s features took shape, one readily apparent characteristic of the agency was that its relatively small size allowed the personality of its director to permeate the organization. In time, the “ARPA style”—freewheeling, open to high risk, agile—would be vaunted. Other Washington bureaucrats came to envy ARPA’s modus operandi. Eventually the agency attracted an elite corps of hard-charging R&D advocates from the finest universities and research laboratories, who set about building a community of the best technical and scientific minds in American research. The

Almost 20 years ago, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers began A Simpler Way, a prophetic book about what organizations could be, with these words: There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play and creativity. Seeking after what’s possible. Being willing to learn and be surprised. The simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It does not need us humans to organize it. This simpler way summons forth what is best about us. It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically. It identifies us as creative. It acknowledges that we seek after meaning. It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives. It does not separate play from the nature of being. … The world we had been taught to see was alien to our humanness. We were taught to see the world as a great machine. But then we could find nothing human in it. Our thinking grew even stranger—we turned this world-image back on ourselves and believed that we too were machines. Because we could not find ourselves in the machine world we had created in thought, we experienced the world as foreign and fearsome. … Fear led to control. We wanted to harness and control everything. We tried, but it did not stop the fear. Mistakes threatened us; failed plans ruined us; relentless mechanistic forces demanded absolute submission. There was little room for human concerns. But the world is not a machine. It is alive, filled with life and the history of life. … Life cannot be eradicated from the world, even though our metaphors have tried. … If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of? If we are free to play, to experiment and discover, if we are free to fail, what might we create? What could we accomplish if we stopped trying to structure the world into existence? What could we accomplish if we worked with life’s natural tendency to organize? Who could we be if we found a simpler way?143

One day, I met a new patient who had been previously diagnosed with severe psychosis. The 55-year-old woman was suffering from depression and anxiety. She had never worked in her life and for a long time had been too anxious to leave home. In the discussion, I had a hunch. The woman might well be psychotic, but she seemed to have extraordinary intuitive powers. Could it be that she was anxious because she was overwhelmed by these powers and didn’t know what to do with them? My hunch was confirmed at the end of the session. I was pregnant at the time, and the woman suddenly told me, out of the blue, “What a beautiful boy! What a pity he hasn’t yet turned to be head-first.” She was right on both counts, but how could she know? I recommended to her that she learn to master her psychic powers. She registered in a course with a renowned teacher. We helped her with her depression in the hospital, but the training proved the key to her healing. Today she is transformed. She has a thriving practice where she offers her talents to the world. What used to cripple her with anxiousness now provides her with meaning and income.81

10. What books would you recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur? Some quick favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke

The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.

We have been thinking and doing a post jobs-system economy in Detroit for more than two decades. In fall 2011, several hundred people from Detroit and around the nation came together to share the lessons we have derived from our struggles to distinguish “work” from “jobs.” I noted that people moved from the farm to the city to take “jobs.” They went from making clothes and growing food to buying clothes and buying food. Humans changed from producers to consumers, and their models and ideals of work became factory oriented. Olga Bonfiglio, a professor at Kalamazoo College, wrote a thoughtful response to my presentation and the many others comprising our Reimagining Work conference. “Basically, work is about one’s calling in life and contributions to the community while jobs are more about the specific tasks people perform for an organization,” she remarked. “ ‘Jobs’ have a dehumanizing effect as people fill interchangeable slots in a big machine. In today’s global economy workers can be easily replaced with those willing to work for lower wages. So, transformation to any new system of ‘work’ must begin with one’s own personal discernment about identity and purpose in this life.” We know we have not been alone in Detroit. All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life—a life that respects Earth and one another. Just as we need to reinvent democracy, now is the time for us to reimagine work and reimagine life. The new paradigm we must establish is about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. It is about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better humans.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

Occupy Wall Street and the Free State Project were ostensibly leaderless organizations that eschewed new power hierarchies.

Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become' was published... in 2012. Its essential insight is that innovation is an investment in the human capital, capabilities, and competencies of customers and clients. Business history gives great credence to this “human capital” model of innovation. For example, George Eastman didn't just invent cheap cameras and film; he created photographers. Steve Jobs didn't merely “reinvent” personal computing and mobile telephony; he reinvented how people physically touched and talked with their technologies. Successful innovators have a “vision of the customer future” that matters every bit as much as their product or service vision. By treating innovation as an investment in customer futures, organizations can make their customers more valuable. In other words, “Making Customers Better Makes Better Customers".

Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become was published... in 2012. Its essential insight is that innovation is an investment in the human capital, capabilities, and competencies of customers and clients. Business history gives great credence to this “human capital” model of innovation. For example, George Eastman didn't just invent cheap cameras and film; he created photographers. Steve Jobs didn't merely “reinvent” personal computing and mobile telephony; he reinvented how people physically touched and talked with their technologies. Successful innovators have a “vision of the customer future” that matters every bit as much as their product or service vision. By treating innovation as an investment in customer futures, organizations can make their customers more valuable. In other words, “Making Customers Better Makes Better Customers.

Crashing through the woods is how we have learned to be together in organizations. All it takes to scare the soul away is to make a sarcastic comment or to roll the eyes in a meeting. If we are to invite all of who we are to show up, including the shy inner voice of the soul, we need to create safe and caring spaces at work. We must learn to discern and be mindful of the subtle ways our words and actions undermine safety and trust in a community of colleagues.

No organization chart, no job description, no job titles ... Teal Organizations reverse the premise: people are not made to fit pre-defined jobs; their job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities they pick up based on the interests, talents and the needs of the organization.

... anybody can put on the hat of `the boss` to bring out about important decisions, launch new initiatives, hold under-performing colleagues to account, help resolve conflicts, or take over leadership if results are bad and action is needed.

When top management asks departments to make their budgets, people play a game called sandbagging—they push for the lowest possible expectation to make sure they will achieve the targets and collect their bonuses. When the numbers don’t add up, top management arbitrarily imposes higher targets (which they make sure exceed what they promised to shareholders, to ensure they will make their bonuses too), which people lower down have no choice but to accept. Instead of frank discussions about what’s feasible and what’s not, people exchange spreadsheets with fictive forecasts driven by fear of not making the numbers. In the process, budgets fail to deliver on one of their key objectives: making people feel accountable and motivated for their outcomes.

Established in 1923, the OGPU replaced the Cheka as Russia’s central organ of the secret police. In 1934, the OGPU would be replaced by the NKVD, which in turn would be replaced by the MGB in 1943 and the KGB in 1954. On the surface, this may seem confusing. But the good news is that unlike political parties, artistic movements, or schools of fashion—which go through such sweeping reinventions—the methodologies and intentions of the secret police never change. So you should feel no need to distinguish one acronym from the next.]

ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are. Eric Butterworth

Information technology tools such as internal social networks and knowledge repositories can play a critical role in steering clear of unnecessary structures, especially when companies grow larger and people are spread throughout different locations.

Digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves.

A leader continuously communicates the benefits of an ever-changing organization. A leader endorses an organization that is continuously reinventing itself to higher and higher levels of productivity and innovation.

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism.

It’s conceivable that in the future the evolutionary purpose, rather than the organization, will become the entity around which people gather. A specific purpose will attract people and organizations in fluid and changing constellations, according to the need of the moment. People will connect in different capacities—fulltime, part-time, freelance, volunteering—and organizations will join forces, or disband, in reaction to what best serves the purpose at the moment. The boundaries of an organization might be harder to trace, and the very notion of an organization less relevant. Creating

If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of?

The heart of the matter is that workers and employees are seen as reasonable people that can be trusted to do the right thing. With that premise, very few rules and control mechanisms are needed.

As leaders, if you don’t transform and use this technology differently—if you don’t reinvent yourself, change your organization structure; if you don’t talk about speed of innovation—you’re going to get disrupted. And it’ll be a brutal disruption, where the majority of companies will not exist in a meaningful way 10 to 15 years from now.

You're efficient when you do something with minimum waste. & you're effective when you're doing the right something." "...the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency & vise versa." "...slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interest of long term health." "Imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of 8 numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space, so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but something is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it." "Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, & to do things that might not work." → time, money, people on job, or even expectations → Not having slack is taxing. Scarcity weighs on our minds and uses up energy that could go toward doing the task at hand better. It amplifies the impact of failures & unintended consequences. → Slack allows us to handle the inevitable shocks & surprise of life. → Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100% busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0% busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively & to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. & bad ones only obsess about removing it. → Only when we are 0% busy can we step back & look at the bigger picture of what we're doing. Slack allows room for that...to think ahead. → We are more productive when we don't try to be productive all the time. → Being comfortable with sometimes being 0% busy means we think about whether we're doing the right thing → Effectiveness → "The secret to top performance is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those seemingly wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.

The rest of the organism was as natural as any other ordinary cell. Indeed, Venter’s synthetic genome depended on the rest of the recipient cell’s natural and native apparatus for its expression: it depended on the cell’s molecular machinery of transcription, translation, and replication, its ribosomes, metabolic pathways, its energy supplies, and so on.

To be a cell, then, is to be a deterministic system governed by DNA, composed largely of proteins and lipids, and energized by ATP. Some cells are more like us than you may imagine—E. coli, for example, the standard organism of genetic engineering.

In nature, E. coli has 4,377 genes on a genome consisting of 4,639,221 base pairs. Blattner reduced the gene count of the laboratory K-12 strain by some 15 percent, thereby producing an organism that was optimized for laboratory, industrial, and academic research purposes.

Not only all human beings, but all their activities, disciplines, and organizations can be looked at through this four-quadrant lens, and the results are always illuminating. According to Integral Theory, any comprehensive account of anything requires a look at all of these perspectives—the first-person (“I”), second-person (“you” and “we”), and third-person (“it” and “its”) perspectives. Most human disciplines acknowledge only one or two of these quadrants and either ignore or deny any real existence to the others. Thus, in consciousness studies, for example, the field is fairly evenly divided between those who believe consciousness is solely the product of Upper-Right or objective “it” processes (namely, the human brain and its activities); while the other half of the field believes consciousness itself (the Upper-Left or subjective “I” space) is primary, and all objects (such as the brain) arise in that consciousness field. Integral Theory maintains that both of those views are right; that is, both of those quadrants (and the other two quadrants) all arise together, simultaneously, and mutually influence each other as correlative aspects of the Whole. Trying to reduce all of the quadrants to one quadrant is “quadrant absolutism,” a wretched form of reductionism that obscures much more than it clarifies; while seeing all of the quadrants mutually arise and “tetra-evolve” sheds enormous light on perpetually puzzling problems (from the body/mind problem to the relation of science and spirituality to the mechanism of evolution itself).

I’ve also found having a lean workforce has side advantages. Managing people well is hard and takes a lot of effort. Managing mediocre-performing employees is harder and more time consuming. By keeping our organization small and our teams lean, each manager has fewer people to manage and can therefore do a better job at it. When

But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won't lose, but you won't win either. Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That's why very few enterprises that were in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend

If you are promoting a culture of candor on your team, you have to get rid of the jerks. Many may think, “This guy is so brilliant, we can’t afford to lose him.” But it doesn’t matter how brilliant your jerk is, if you keep him on the team you can’t benefit from candor. The cost of jerkiness to effective teamwork is too high. Jerks are likely to rip your organization apart from the inside. And their favorite way to do that is often by stabbing their colleagues in the front and then offering, “I was just being candid.

In most organizations, shouting criticism out in front of a group, while that person is in the middle of a presentation, would be considered inappropriate and unhelpful. But if you manage to inculcate an effective culture of candor, all involved would recognize that this feedback from Bianca was a gift.

If you give employees more freedom instead of developing processes to prevent them from exercising their own judgment, they will make better decisions and it’s easier to hold them accountable. This also makes for a happier, more motivated workforce as well as a more nimble company. But to develop a foundation that enables this level of freedom you need to first increase two other elements: + Build up talent density. At most companies, policies and control processes are put in place to deal with employees who exhibit sloppy, unprofessional, or irresponsible behavior. But if you avoid or move out these people, you don’t need the rules. If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls. The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer. + Increase candor. Talented employees have an enormous amount to learn from one another. But the normal polite human protocols often prevent employees from providing the feedback necessary to take performance to another level. When talented staff members get into the feedback habit, they all get better at what they do while becoming implicitly accountable to one another, further reducing the need for traditional controls.

With these two elements in place you can now . . . - Reduce controls. Start by ripping pages from the employee handbook. Travel policies, expense policies, vacation policies—these can all go. Later, as talent becomes increasingly denser and feedback more frequent and candid, you can remove approval processes throughout the organization, teaching your managers principles like, “Lead with context, not control,” and coaching your employees using such guidelines as, “Don’t seek to please your boss.

Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why?6 Because our working identity has remained the same.

Becoming our own person, breaking free from our “ought selves”—the identity molded by important people in our lives—is at the heart of the transition process. So is ridding ourselves of an unhealthy overidentification with the organizations that employ us, a harder-to-recognize but equally problematic self-definition.

One of the reasons it is so hard to change careers—or why we change, only to end up in the same boat—is that we can so fully internalize our institutional identities, relying on them to convey our worth and accomplishments to the outside world. Even when we can honestly admit that the external trappings of success—titles, perks, and other markers of prestige—don’t matter much, we can, like Harris, hide from the need for change by telling ourselves how much the company needs us. Like Dan, who postponed vacations and overrode family obligations when the organization needed him, most working adults organize at least some portion of their working lives according to the principle that self-sacrifice is OK when it’s for the good of the institution. Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.

This is the great benefit to the Netflix vacation freedom,” she explained. “Not that you can take more or less days off, but that you can organize your life in any crazy way you like—and as long as you do great work nobody bats an eyelid.

Manipulating your message to make the organization, yourself, or another employee appear better than reality is so common across the business world that many leaders don’t even realize they’re doing it. We “spin” by selectively sharing the facts, overemphasizing the positive, minimizing the negative, all in an attempt to shape the perception of others.

I’ve also found having a lean workforce has side advantages. Managing people well is hard and takes a lot of effort. Managing mediocre-performing employees is harder and more time consuming. By keeping our organization small and our teams lean, each manager has fewer people to manage and can therefore do a better job at it. When those lean teams are exclusively made up of exceptional-performing employees, the managers do better, the employees do better, and the entire team works better—and faster.

Consider how many times we have heard people reproach their organizations by saying, “There is no one there I want to be like.” The reinventing process corrects this deficiency, heightening our desire for role models and people we can relate to. These people and groups provide a “safe base” that enables us to take risks with our new selves and a professional community in which we can develop a new sense of belonging.

We now do the 360 written feedback every year, asking each person to sign their comments. We no longer have employees rate each other on a scale of 1 to 5, since we don’t link the process to raises, promotions, or firings. The goal is to help everyone get better, not to categorize them into boxes. The other big improvement is that each person can now give feedback to as many colleagues as they choose at any level in the organization—not just direct reports, line managers, or a few teammates who have invited input. Most people at Netflix provide feedback for at least ten colleagues, but thirty or forty is common. I received comments from seventy-one people on my 2018 report.

There's no rule that says someone has to ride or drive or have a hands-on connection tog et joy from horses; some sponsor a young rider, work with horse-rescue organizations, build saddles, or write horse books. Others read horse books, and still others have horses as pasture pets and never ride them but get a great deal of pleasure from the company of their horses and from just taking care of them. The only person you have to please is yourself.

We are addicted to the idea that the world can be predicted and controlled—that our stoplights are the only way to keep things in check. But when you view the world that way, today’s uncertainty and volatility become triggers for retreating to what has worked in the past. We just need to hire more capable leaders. We just need to squeeze out a little more efficiency and growth. We just need to reorganize. . . . But we know better. The real barrier to progress in the twenty-first century is us.

An organization operating with a new master paradigm, the Re-Invention Paradigm, by contrast, develops an organizational context that operates from practices designed to “invent and commit,” the practices necessary to operate in a mode of transformation: declaring the future rather than predicting it; taking a stand rather than generating consensus; making bold promises that you don’t know how to keep; creating contexts; fulfilling new realms of possibility; and recruiting and developing catalysts for transformation rather than change agents.

The internet we know is full of places, languages, territories, and it’s an alternate world in itself. The strange thing is that, deep down, we don’t reinvent anything in this new world. We have this powerful tool, this parallel space that should be ideal, in theory, since it’s completely controlled by us, its creators. And yet it has the same functional faults as the physical world—the real one, you might say. All the social problems of our world exist online: theft, pedophilia, pornography, organized crime, drug trafficking, assassinations… The only difference is that everyone dares to be criminals or morally wrong, at least once, in the cyber world, but even when we do, we’re embarrassed, as if we’re incapable of thinking outside the original format. Humans have created this fantastic space of freedom and made it into a carbon copy of the world system. It’s as if we weren’t creative enough to invent a new moral code that would work online or new representations of ourselves that challenge the ones we’ve always had.

There is one striking paradox I want to highlight: These companies are highly profitable, despite the fact that they seem to be, from an Orange perspective at least, quite careless about profits. Remember that they don’t make detailed budgets, they don’t compare budgets to actuals at the end of the month, they don’t set sales targets, and colleagues are free to spend any money they deem necessary without approval from above. They focus on what needs to be done, not on profitability, and yet this results in stellar profits.

No one can be made to evolve in consciousness, even with the best of intentions—a hard truth for coaches and consultants, who wish they could help organizational leaders adopt a more complex worldview by the power of conviction.

Imposing fixed working hours is based on the premise that people are resources, a set of arms or brains hired for a specific amount of time.

Not surprisingly, people resist being moved around.

Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, proclaimed in a treatise written in 350 BC that women have fewer teeth than men.

Many people transitioning to this stage take up practices like meditation, centering, martial arts, yoga, or simply walking in nature to find a quiet place that allows the inner voice of the soul to speak its truth and guidance. Individuals who live from this perspective and connect to a deeper sense of purpose can become quite fearless in pursuit of their calling. With their ego under control, they don’t fear failure as much as not trying.