"Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, 'Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.'" Peter Drucker

"Success and rest don't sleep together." Russian proverb

"You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion." E. S. Raymond

Todays image: Vine Grapes by Elenapaint. Outstanding. Thank you!

Paradigm

Let's revisit one of those words. The difference today is we will employ the considerable intellect of two gifted guys. First, Gary Hamel, to wit:

"Modern management isn't just a suite of useful tools and techniques; it is a paradigm, to borrow a sound bite from Thomas Kuhn's overused argot. A paradigm is more than a way of thinking - it's a worldview, a broadly and deeply held belief about what types of problems are worth solving, or are even solvable. Listen to Kuhn on this point: '[A] paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that...can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will...encourage its members to undertake. Other problems...are rejected as metaphysical...or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the [familiar] puzzle form because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools which the paradigm provides.'

We are all prisoners of our paradigms. And as managers, we are captives of a paradigm that places the pursuit of efficiency ahead of every other goal. This is hardly surprising, since modern management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency." From Gary's new writing - The Future of Management. Highly recommended. (Amazon info here).

Second, Michael Rosenblum. Michael writes...

"There is an old expression that says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

What happens in fact is that invention comes along, and it messes up everyones way of doing things, so they want it to go away. They bury it. It wrecks their lives. Executives in corporations put off dealing with new inventions until their tour of duty is over. “Leave it for someone else… I don’t really understand it” they say.

Ice, of course, is our classic example.

Once a massive industry, it was rendered obsolete in a stroke when refrigeration was invented.

No one in the ice business wanted refrigeration, and almost no one in the ice business ‘got’ refrigeration.

All they ‘got’ was unemployed."

Read Michael's entire post Frozen Assets here. Put Michael's blog, here, into your reader. Highly recommended.