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"Instead of focusing on their individual agendas, collaborative partnerships establish common goals. In order to address problems that lie beyond any single agency's exclusive purview, but which concern them all, partners agree to pool resources, jointly plan, implement, and evaluate new services and procedures, and delegate individual responsibility for the outcomes of their joint efforts."
This quote comes from an oft-cited monograph by Atelia I. Melaville with Martin J. Blank called What It Takes: Structuring Interagency Partnerships to Connect Children and Families with Comprehensive Services (Washington DC: Education and Human Services Consortium, 1991).
http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/ppcc.html
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper...
When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.
"That leaves 93 percent of "potential" untapped. Humans only use 10 percent of the brain and 7 percent of company databases, yet we’re always 100 percent sure of everything. That just doesn’t add up."
-Christina Bultinck, Mine Your Own Business, "Executive Update magazine"
In the business world an executive knows something about everything, a technician knows everything about something - and the switchboard operator knows everything.
"Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design.... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction."
The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
"The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken…since big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy its products: the biggest enterprise loses its power and its influence when it loses its customers."
The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants them to do, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy.
If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won't be able to make much interesting sense of what's going on or of its place in it. That's not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.
Books about Business
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