Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.
To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.
It is far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right.
In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.
No problem stays solved in a dynamic environment.
Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.
Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.
The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.
A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution.
The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things.
Nothing is harder to topple than a fact that supports a deeply held prejudice denied by its holder.
The future is better dealt with using assumptions than forecasts.
Creativity is the ability to identify self-imposed constraints, remove them, and explore the consequences of their removal.
So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell.
The objective of education is learning, not teaching.
It is the satisfaction we derive from ‘going there’ in contrast to the satisfaction derived from ‘getting there.’ Recreation provides ‘the pause that refreshes.’ It recreates creators.
Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don’t know what they are talking about.
Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.