Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts. But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change.

Great companies make meaning. A company has a name, but its people give it meaning.

The incremental approach to change is effective when what you want is more of what you've already got.

The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or getting an 80-20 understanding of the situation. The overriding objective is engagement, creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take action.

Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.

People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting.

Nothing fails like success.