Quotes on Kindle

I read almost all (non-fiction) books on Kindle nowadays, and I highlight the texts that I find most interesting. If you want you can follow my reading progress on Kindle here.

As an example, here are some interesting quotes I found recently…

Gary Hamel, What Matters Now

“Most companies don’t have adaptability DNA in their corporate genome. Their core management processes weren’t built with adaptability in mind. Changing this will require the equivalent of gene therapy: organizations must complement their efficiency DNA with adaptability DNA. What does that mean practically? It means working hard to learn from the things in our world that have demonstrated their adaptability over decades, centuries, and eons—things like biological systems, democracies, cities, and stock markets.”

“When lobbyists and legislators sit down to a lavish meal, our interests won’t be on the menu.”

Tim Harford, Adapt

“There is nothing that says a business must live for ever – and the entire success of the market system is predicated on the fact that they don’t.”

“The problem seems to be that governments love to back losers: think about the big banks or car companies. The ideal candidate to receive government support seems to be a company that is very big and very unsuccessful. This is the perfect formula for sustained failure.”

Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

“When members of a leadership team feel a stronger sense of commitment and loyalty to the team they lead than the one they’re a member of, then the team they’re a member of becomes like the U.S. Congress or the United Nations: it’s just a place where people come together to lobby for their constituents.”

“Because the purpose of an interview should be to best simulate a situation that will give evaluators the most accurate view of how a candidate really behaves, it seems to me that getting them out of the office and doing something slightly more natural and unconventional would be a better idea. Heck, even taking a walk or going shopping is better than sitting behind a desk. The key is to do something that provides evaluators with a real sense of whether the person is going to thrive in the culture of the organization and whether other people are going to enjoy working with him or her.”

Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

“This distinction between managers as traditional and rational while true leaders are charismatic is clearly an idealization and a rather simplistic one at that. In reality, leaders do find that they have to attend to often mundane administrative tasks and managers do have to lead those who report to them if they are to get anything done.”

“Self-organization simply means local interaction and there is nothing wonderful, emancipating or mysterious about it because both good, say democracy, and very bad, say ruthless dictatorship, patterns across a population emerge in local interaction. It follows that it is nonsense to talk about unleashing, or allowing, or stopping, self-organization simply because local interaction is what humans do whether they are allowed to or not, and since they are already always doing it there is nothing to unleash.”

If you want to see all the quotes I highlighted, go to my Kindle page.