The Organization of the Future

"Reinvention is a journey that requires an inclination to action, rather than an inclination to study; it is marked by breakdowns from which we must recover and move on."

"No workforce that I know of has ever arrived at the office or plant on Monday morning and voted to transform the company."

"You should anticipate two needs that people have during a major change program. The first is the need to believe that the company's management knows what it's doing."

"With a market waiting to be taken, brilliance and innovation were unnecessary; caution and plodding could be counted on to carry the day. So why take risks?"

"Managers are not the deciders of the fate of employees; customers are."

"Most people, whether they are customers or employees, are worried about the future for their children and the planet the next generation will inherit as much as they are about higher pay and promotions."

"The teamwork ethic does, of course, need to extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the organization to the value chain of allied organizations and teams."

"To manage effective partnerships, leaders will have to master three imperatives."

"To assume that it is impossible to create job security in the twenty-first century is to set a boundary that is illusory."

"Mondragon's entrepreneurial success rate has been 80 percent! That is the failure rate for the rest of the world!"

"An organization is only as strong as the continuing education of its principal managers and leaders."

"Six important shifts of emphasis are shaping the organization of the future, and each has significant human implications."

"To promote innovation and responsiveness?two of today's competitive imperatives?managers need to see the new organization as a cluster of activity sets, not as a rigid structure. "

"Over three decades of study have led me to identify six practices as the most essential to building self-esteem."

"To encourage self-assertiveness, teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning."

"The "new work contract"?where employees take responsibility for their own careers and corporations provide them with career-enhancing but impermanent opportunities?can be as difficult for organizations to manage as it is for individuals. "

"Those of us who thought that paying a big salary would make up for everything else in life probably had better start thinking again."