Mavericks in the Workplace

"We know what such workplaces look like, whether they're characterized as high performance, or high commitment or participatory. Increasingly, they look like American society itself."

"A widely accepted and deeply held management ideology in America holds that organizations which face great challenges require strong, take-charge leaders."

"The key to the Bay Colony's extraordinary dynamism, its ability to adjust to the unforeseen, adapt to it, and exploit it as an opportunity, was a distinct set of democratic values that worked their way into governance."

"The value of the covenants or constitutions lay not in the particular procedures they stipulated, but in the astuteness with which they aligned the individual interests of members with those of the group."

"What moved Americans was not an inspiring leadership calling them to a new utopia, but the realization that continuing under the status quo would threaten their livelihoods and their personal autonomy."

"Limited or one-shot attempts at employee participation don't work."

"Federal organizations thus build on and preserve a fundamental tenant of citizenship: The sum total given to all centers of power, and to each branch within each center, is finite and specified."

"The team becomes just as stifling to individual creativity as top-down control."

"The autocratic Europeans believed that every great institution required a foundation of sophisticated theory."

"The process of breaking situations down into distinct parts, applying the correct theory, and putting the pieces back together into a whole doesn't reflect reality anymore than gluing pieces of a broken mirror does."

"Pragmatists rely less on abstract theories to understand the world, and more on observation and testing."

"Entrepreneurism is a trait widely dispersed throughout American society."

"Traditional organizations deplore anything that seeks change, upsets markets and disorganizes industries in ways that are inevitably unpredictable, but such are the necessary ingredients of true entrepreneurism's creative destruction."

"What, exactly, do entrepreneurs do?"

"Entrepreneurs are highly adept at weeding through ideas fast."

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