Often it takes more time to explain a task than to do it yourself, and when you do it yourself there is no data lost in transmission. We have something to learn about how communication works in these settings. Sometimes it takes a really long time to communicate the full meaning of what we want to say.
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 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 McCrackenBusiness schools do most things very well. They are just not comprehensive and what they miss are things like culture and creativity and a certain kind of pattern recognition that comes easily to people trained in the liberal arts.
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 McCrackenOften creativity comes from a very pragmatic kind of "well, what if we try this. How about this." You set some parameters and then work through the variations. It's hard to see something as a concept. It literally comes out of the hands on experiment.
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