Finding the right people and giving power and letting them go find value in the world. That's got to be toughest. Really, its like the Spanish court in the 16th century saying, um, take this ship and go see what you can find. You have to believe in your sailors!
Grant David McCrackenNow that everyone is reinventing and innovating, advantage goes to those who keep at it. We need to greet even success with humility.
Grant David McCrackenThe University of Chicago is an astounding place. It's Yeshiva, a priesthood. It gives you an education, but more than that it gives you a mission. Oh, and an arrogance. But being Canadian helps with that.
Grant David McCrackenThat culture is a a critical resource the organization ignores. Competely mystifying. The organization continues to act as if culture were dark matter, something essentially inaccessible to us. When in fact there is an ancient discipline called anthropology that's pretty good at thinking about it.
Grant David McCrackenThe future is going to be stranger and more various and more dynamic than anything people can imagine now. We will be extraordiarily tested. I wish us the best of luck!
Grant David McCrackenMost change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.
Grant David McCracken