Adaptation
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin
Hope springs eternal in the human heart.
— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
As TV’s Craig Ferguson would say, “It’s a great day for America, everybody.”
Life’s a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.
Every crowd has a silver lining.
— Phineas Taylor Barnum
If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud–comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature.
— Ayn Rand, Spoken by Francisco d’Aconia to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged
I have been a leader in a number of organizations that were in dire need of change. Building a “case for change” is usually difficult. People seem compelled to continue in their dysfunctional ways despite their inefficacy or discomfort. I have learned that sometimes you have to let things fall to the floor and break before you can pick up the shards and create the change that the organization so desperately needs.
Atlas Shrugged struck me as a testament to this approach to change management, albeit with a more poetic and metaphorical approach.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
— Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)
We don’t have one big advantage so we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.
— Jeff Bezos