Wonderful Managerial Quotes

This is a bitter irony. That a faith based on staggering mysteries –the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, the imparting of the Spirit — should have become shorn of mystery, so plodding and prosaic, so mundane and managerial is a bitter irony. It’s an irony that Jesus’ famous statement to Nicodemus, you must be born again, has in our hands been turned into a slogan and a formula. Out of Jesus’ mouth, in Nicodemus’ ear, that statement proclaimed a staggering mystery. It was the ultimate antiformula.

A good example of ill-conceived (and premature) training approaches is seen in the many calls I get to conduct training programs to help people become better managers. I put my callers through a standard set of questions: •Did you choose people for managerial roles because they were the type of people who could get their fulfillment and satisfaction out of helping other people shine rather than having the ego-need to shine themselves? (No!) •Did you select them because they had a prior history of being able to give a critique to someone in such a way that the other person responds: "Wow, that was really helpful, I'm glad you helped me see all that." (No!) •Do you reward these people for how well their group has done, or do you reward them for their own personal accomplishments in generating business and serving clients? (Both, but with an emphasis on their personal numbers!) People can detect immediately a lack of alignment between what they are being trained in and how they are being managed. When they do detect it, little of what has been discussed or "trained" ever gets implemented. "So, let's summarize;' I say. "You've chosen people who don't want to do the job, who haven't demonstrated any prior aptitude for the job, and you are rewarding them for things other than doing the job?" Thanks, but I'll pass on the wonderful privilege of training them! Here's a good test for the timing of training: If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but your people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, "I have got to learn this-it's going to be critical for my future; then, and only then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? ....Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? ....Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us... ....those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents? - excerpts from Margaret Atwood's introduction (2007) to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered? Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us. Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?

Much more than accumulations of books, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilisation; magical places in which students, scholars, curators, philanthropists, artists, pranksters and flirts come together and make something marvellous. Yet none of these descriptions fits comfortably in the arid, clinical, neo-liberal, managerial paradigm of inputs and outputs and outcomes. And therein lies a problem. Throughout most of the modern world, that very paradigm guides how public funds are spent. The inputs for libraries (books, librarians, capital) are easy enough to identify, and to count. But what are the ‘outputs’ of a library, and how might the ‘outcomes’ be measured? The ‘performance’ of libraries resists evaluation as much as the ‘customers’ of libraries resist classification.