Editor Quotes

More than any other in Western Europe, Britain remains a country where a traveler has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.