Gatillos para pensar - POR Alberto Levy

http://www.albertolevyblog.com/gatillos-para-pensar/

Frases en español

“Todo cambia y nada permanece; todo se mueve y nada queda fijo… Las cosas frías se tornan calientes, las cosas calientes se vuelven frías; lo mojado se seca y lo reseco se humedece”

-Heráclito, 500 a.C.

“Para vivir con esas paradojas, se requiere una gran fuerza de carácter. También se requiere tener fe en lo que uno está haciendo. El dinero sólo no basta para proporcionar el motivo para aceptar estas contradicciones. Incluso la afición al poder es insuficiente porque el poder suprime las contradicciones en lugar de mantenerlas en equilibrio. Los grandes líderes son producto de las grandes causas, pero los líderes, en el mejor de los casos, también generan grandes causas. Tristemente, por carecer de una causa, nosotros también solemos crear una crisis, y no es lo mismo en absoluto. A menos que una empresa cree una causa más amplia y más importante que el enriquecimiento de los accionistas, tendrá pocos líderes”

–Charles Handy.

Cuando miramos con ambos ojos obtenemos una visión distinta de la que tendríamos si usamos un ojo cada vez independientemente. Cada ojo ve la misma realidad de una forma diferente, y cuando trabajan juntos, los dos se combinan para producir todavía otra forma más. Pruébelo y verá. Creo que ocurre el mismo proceso cuando aprendemos a interpretar el mundo a través de metáforas diferentes. El proceso de enmarcar y reenmarcar producen por sí solos una forma cualitativa diferente de entendimiento paralelos a la calidad de visión binocular. Así como intentamos comprender los fenómenos de las organizaciones como máquinas, organismos, culturas, sistemas políticos, instrumentos de dominación y así sucesivamente, una nueva y profunda perspicacia emerge. La propia forma de vernos a nosotros mismos transforma nuestra comprensión del fenómeno.

-Gareth Morgan “Images of Organization”

“Para la mente ingenua, revolución y evolución parecen incompatibles y el desarrollo histórico continúa únicamente mientras sigue una línea recta. Cuando se producen trastornos, o cuando se rompe el tejido histórico, la mente ingenua ve tan sólo catástrofes, vacíos y discontinuidad. La historia parece detenerse y caer muerta, hasta que, de nuevo, toma el sendero directo del desarrollo.

Por el contrario, el pensamiento científico considera la revolución y la evolución como dos formas de desarrollo mutuamente relacionadas, de las que una presupone la otra”.

Lev S. Vygotski, “El Desarrollo de los Procesos Psicológicos Superiores”

“A pesar de los importantes avances que se atribuyen a la metodología conductista, dicho método resulta ser harto limitado. El mayor reto que plantea a los psicólogos es el de descubrir y sacar a la luz de los mecanismos ocultos que subyacen a la compleja psicología humana. Por más que el método conductista sea objetivo y adecuado al estudio de los procesos psicológicos complejos. Los mecanismos internos, característicos de dichos procesos, permanecen ocultos.

La aproximación naturalista a la conducta en general no toma en consideración la diferencia cualitativa entre la historia humana y la de los animales. La ramificación experimental de este tipo de análisis es que la conducta humana se estudia prescindiendo de la historia general del desarrollo humano”.

Lev S. Vygotski, “El Desarrollo de los Procesos Psicológicos Superiores”

“El hecho de que en el curso de la historia el hombre haya desarrollado nuevas funciones no significa que cada una de ellas descanse en un nuevo grupo de células nerviosas ni que los nuevos “centros” de las funciones nerviosas superiores sean semejantes a aquellas tan ansiosamente buscadas por los neurólogos durante el último tercio del siglo XIX. El desarrollo de nuevos “órganos funcionales” se realiza a través de la formación de nuevos sistemas funcionales, constituyendo un medio para el desarrollo ilimitado de la actividad cerebral. El córtex cerebral humano, gracias a este principio, se convierte en un órgano de civilización en el que se hallan escondidas posibilidades ilimitadas, y no exige nuevos aparatos morfológicos cada vez que la historia crea la necesidad de una nueva función”.

Lev S. Vygotski, “El Desarrollo de los Procesos Psicológicos Superiores”

Frases en inglés

“People feel that we are here by predestination and that because we are humans we will be able to survive even if we make mistakes. But these people have no perspective on the fact that humans are living organisms. There have been thousands of living organisms of which a very high percentage has become extinct. There is nothing, at the moment, to suggest that we are not part of that same pattern… there is one point of difference; man is the only organism with power to reflect on its past and upon its future. That power to reflect is what makes us able to plan our future in such a way as to avoid what seems inevitable”.

- Richard Leakey, anthropologist.

“Oil resources are not inexhaustible –but that was already known to us years ago. The so-called rich nations have never been so well endowed with scientists, technicians, thinkers, computers, machines, schools and universities, and here they are plunged deep into disarray.

Our territories are blanketed with electric and nuclear power, roads, lorries and cars and now they are threatened with paralysis.

Western countries maintain the most costly armies in the world, and now they have become the former rich beginning petrodollars from the former poor.

We are told that to govern is to foresee, but our governments are reduced to contending with events that cannot be foreseen.

Is not the real crisis in fact a brain and a mind crisis?”

Le monde, October 19, 1974

“… Fuller makes an important point. If his distinction between the functions of the brain and the mind is essentially correct –as we believe it to be, at least with regard to decision-thinking efforts- thinking as an act or process performed by that part of the mechanism in our heads that Fuller identifies as the mind, and the complementary act of storage, processing and retrieval of information to support the thinking activity of the mind as one of the principal functions of what Fuller refers to as the brain. Thus, within this framework, we need both a brain function and a mind function in order to think and to make decisions”.

Ben Heirs and Gordon Pehrson, “The Mind of the Organization”

“The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have placed into his hands. But he can make no progress with himself unless he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature. Unfortunately, a terrifying ignorance prevails in this respect”.

C.G. Jung

“A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong” –but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is probably more nearly right than the other.

… The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives.”

Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities, New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

“The various functions which make up an organization are always mediated by the interactions of people, so that the organization can never escape its human processes. As long as organizations are networks of people, there will be processes occurring between them. Therefore, it is obvious that the better understood and better diagnosed these processes are, the grater will be the chances of finding solutions to… problems which will be accepted and used by the members of the organization”.

Edgar H. Schein, “Processes Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development”

“Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward”. S. Kierkegaard

“The Navy´s nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines have proved extraordinarily elusive: the Soviets have yet to detect any of the 41 Polaris submarines that have carried out 1500 60-day patrols in strategic waters since 1960. So says Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, who at 78 is still running the Navy´s nuclear-propulsion program. He recently told a Congressional committee: “these missile-carrying submarines are probably the greatest means the U.S. has for averting war. When they are at sea they cannot be detected.” The Navy claims that it can keep track of a corresponding Russian fleet, thanks to superior U.S. electronic surveillance and noisier Soviet subs.”

Newsweek, May 15, 1978.

“In the heart of Europe there was once a great empire. It was composed of so many and so widely different cultures that no commonsense solution to any problem could ever be reached, and absurdity became the only possible way of life. Its inhabitants –the Austro-Hungarians, as the reader may already have suspected- thus were proverbial not only for their inability to cope reasonably with the simplest problems, but also for their ability to achieve the impossible somehow almost by default. Britain, as one bon mot claimed, loses every battle except the decisive ones; Austria loses every battle except the hopeless ones. (Small wonder, since the highest military decoration was reserved for officers who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by taking some action that was in flat contradiction to the general battle plan.)

The great empire is now a tiny country, but absurdity has remained in inhabitants’ outlook on life, and the author of these pages is no exception. For all of them, life is hopeless, but no serious”.

Paul Watzlawick, “The Situation is Hopeless, but Not Serious: The Pursuit of Happiness”.

“The mere fact that other people may recommend something becomes the very reason for rejecting it –even if, seen objectively, that something would be to this advantage. (Maturity, as a colleague of mine has defined it, is the ability to do something even though your parents have recommended it.)

However, the true genius manages to go to the ultimate extreme and with heroic determination rejects even what he himself considers the best decision, that is, the voice of his own tail but actually devours itself, and a state of unhappiness is created that is beyond comparison.

Of course, for my less gifted readers this state of misery remains a sublime I unattainable goal”.

Paul Watzlawick, “The Situation is Hopeless, but Not Serious: The Pursuit of Happiness”.

“On the one hand, it is obvious that no organism can react to its environment in a random fashion, that is, in one way today and quite differently tomorrow. This vital necessity of adequate adaptation leads to the emergence of specific patterns of behavior whose purpose, ideally, is successful and painless survival. For reasons that are not yet sufficiently understood, men as well as animals tend to consider these optimal adaptations as final and thus valid forever. This naïve assumption blinds us to the fact that these patterns are bound to become more and more anachronistic. It also makes it impossible for us to see that a number of other possible, feasible, and perhaps even better solutions exist –and presumably, have always existed. This double blindness has a double effect: First, it makes the chosen solution more and more useless and the overall situation thus increasingly hopeless; secondly, this increasing discomfort, coupled with the unshakable belief that there is only this one solution, leaves only one conclusion –that one must do more of the same. And by doing more of the same, one gets more of the same misery”.

Paul Watzlawick, “The Situation is Hopeless, but Not Serious: The Pursuit of Happiness”.

“Renowned for its planning systems, Shell now publicly argues (Kahane, 1991) that such system are primarily to do with responses that might be possible. Shell is not alone in this view. Strategic management is not about establishing “right” or “optimal” solutions, but about understanding complex relationships, and uncertain futures. The emphasis then is on challenging management understanding and the tacit knowledge of the organization”.

John Hendry & Gerry Johnson, “Strategic Thinking”

“Much of past research in industry structures and competition has tended to present markets as domains with objectively real boundaries, with clearly cut lists of players, and with well defined products and services being traded among market participants.

However, markets and competition are not always as objectively real as they may seem. Research Studies using a cognitive analysis of competition suggests new insights into the nature of industry structures. In particular, in emergent industrial settings, we can observe that first-mover entrepreneurial firms can provide industry leadership and influence the structures of new competitive domains towards their own ends and means, thereby creating potentially sustainable competitive advantages”.

Michael Levenhagen, Joseph F. Porac, Howard Thomas

“The link between organizational identity and strategic agenda building suggests several important research questions. First, a focus on strategic agenda building encourages research on the process by which issues are identified and legitimated in organizations. Studies of these processes need to represent the perceptual and political forces at work in activating individuals and groups to mobilize resources aimed at directing the attentional investments of key organizational channels. Second, if encourages research on the substance of individual and collective beliefs about an organization´s identity, and the connections between these beliefs and individual and collective motivation to interpret and act on issues in particular ways”.

Jane E. Dutton & Wendy J. Penner, “Strategic Thinking: Leadership and the Management of Change”

“I believe… that in deciding where you would like to be, as opposed to where you are going to end up, you need a great deal of discussion and a great deal of development of a new thinking and new processes. The idea of doing this through the planning department, or through a paper on strategy presented to the board, seems to me to be quite inadequate. This process involves large amounts of time and constant discussion with those involved lower down the line who will actually execute the strategies on which the whole picture relies. This sort of circular debate, frequently widening out to involve others within and without the company, goes on until all are satisfied that the result is a s good as they are going to get”.

Harvey-Jones, “Making it Happen”

“… Leadership studies remain in danger of treating such personal qualities as “charisma” as too literally “God-given”. The psychological insights being developed in contemporary leadership studies should be complemented by an understanding of the social bases of leaders’ powers and the social inspirations for their conduct. The structurationist perspective is proposed here as a means of reconciling leadership and elite theories in a way that recognizes managerial leaders as something more than either exceptional personalities or mere creatures of class. Rather, leaders are people who enjoy privileged access to, and unusual skill with, the diverse material and symbolic resources, ideals and codes of conduct supplied by their complex positions in society as a whole”.

Richard Whittington, “Social Structures and Strategic Leadership”

“We cannot perceive unless we anticipate but we must not see only what we anticipate… Although a perceiver always has at least some (more or less specific) anticipation before he begins to pick up information about a given object, they can be corrected as well as sharpened in the course of looking… The upshot of the argument is that perception is directed by expectations but not controlled by them”.

Neisser, U. “Cognitive Psychology”, 1976

“The information that the master picks up from the chessboard determines not only where he will move his pieces but where he will move his eyes. Observations show that good chess player´s eye movements are closely related to the structure of the position on the board; he looks at crucial pieces and crucial squares. He quite literally sees the position differently –more adequately and comprehensively- than a novice or a nonplayer would. Of course, even the nonplayer sees a great deal: the chessmen are of carved ivory, the knight resembles a horse, the pieces are (perhaps) arrayed with a certain geometrical regularity. A young child would see still less: that the pieces would fit in his mouth, perhaps, or could be knocked over. A newborn infant might just see that “something” was in front of him. To be sure, he is not mistaken in this; something is in front of him. The differences among these perceivers are not matters of truth and error but of noticing more rather than less. The information that specifies the proper move is available in the light sampled by the baby as by the master, but only the master is equipped to pick it up”.

Neisser, U. “Cognitive Psychology”, 1976

“Just as individuals integrate new information into their own belief system; it is necessary for individuals within the organization to have some integration of beliefs in order for the collection of individuals that make up the organization to take concerted action. Recognizing the difficulty and complexity arising from the individual integration process highlights the complexity of the organization experience. For individuals, changes in beliefs arising from the resolution of a conflict or filling a gap, is done within the context of the meaning that they alone attribute to the situation. The added complexity for organizations arises from the integration of a variety of beliefs by individuals who attribute various meanings to that which they are trying to share. Furthermore, the systems and structure of the organization are store houses of beliefs that also guide what individuals interpret and integrate”.

Mary M. Crossan, Henry W. Lane & Terry Hildebrand, “Organization Learning: Theory to Practice”

“As innovation increasingly determines competitive advantage, the internal modes of operations, i.e. the “organizational capabilities”, of large corporations have to change. To overcome self-generated bureaucratic sluggishness of their companies, top managers need to change their concept of structure, decision and effectiveness and engage in a process of organizational transformation. Successful processes link cognitive/ intellectual and emotional “discovery” at individual level with collective “learning by doing” to achieve lasting “cultural” change.

Yves Doz & Heinz Thanheiser, “Regaining Competitiveness: A Process of Organizational Renewal”

“Competitive battles are won by organizational capability rather than by new products, resources or market position, per se.

Imaginative and effective resource deployment and successful new market creation results from the organizational capabilities of cultivating, mobilizing and creatively leveraging competences and skills, and of integrating specialized inputs into the creation and exploitation of new business opportunities. Organizational capabilities are the root of competitive advantage”.

Doz and Prahalad, 1988.

“Failure is attributed both to fallacious simplifying assumptions about how change in behavior occurs (one often-held assumption is that new beliefs lead to new behavior) and to errors in execution such as lack of process understanding, a lack of sustained leadership in the change process, and too frequent modification of emphasis and instruments in the course of the change process”.

Doz and Prahalad, 1987.

“My conviction is that strategy is about learning quickly and that learning occurs through cybernetic loops and circular process. All systems of this kind tend to have negative feedback with the power to constrain, correct and “fine tune” the process. As such, learning loops are replete with dilemmas, for example with “more” followed by “less”, “error” followed by “correction”, “disturbance” followed by “stabilization”, in what Gregory Bateson termed the ecology of mind”.

Charles M. Humpden-Turner, “Strategic Thinking: Leadership and the management of change”

“A Nordstrom salesperson advises you in your selection, helps you try things on, takes care of alterations, wraps things up, helps you check out, handles returns, and even follows you from one department to another. Therein lies the novelty: You can be dressed from head to toe by the same salesperson. This is why Nordstrom has become the most closely watched, if not the most copied, chain of stores, not just in California, not just in the United States, but in the entire world.”

Jean-Marie Dru “Disruption”

“The world moves faster than thought. Yet only thought can make sense of the world”.

J.P. Barbou

“Reframing is the ability to see things, problems, situations in other ways, to look at them sideways, to put them in another perspective, or another context…it means taking information, perspective, knowledge, and looking at them in a new light. It will materialize through a leap, a turning point, a transversal idea, you name it”.

Charles Handy “The age of Unreason”

“Nike is and will remain the sweaty side of health and fitness, together with the romance of it”.

Phil Knight

“Mankind´s greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking”…”Our greatest hopes can become reality in the future with the help of modern technology. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking”.

Stephen Hawking

“There is a time in every man´s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion. Insist on yourself. Never imitate…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. To believe your own thoughts. To believe that what is true for you and your private heart is true for all men. That is genius!”.

Comercial de Reebok

“For over three hundred years they´ve been coming. And while most haven´t brought riches, they have brought dreams. At The Wall Street Journal, we believe that the most precios resources a country can have are the hopes of its people. Because tomorrow´s achievements grow out of today´s dreams”.

The Wall Streer Journal

“Knowledge is ultimately available to everyone. Only true intuition, jumping from knowledge to an idea, is yours and yours alone.”

Bill Bernbach

“Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company´s name on it. That bullet may be a company that´s eager to exploit a disruptive technology, it may be an impending shift in customer preferences, a demographic change, a lifestyle trend or a regulatory upheaval that will render your strategy obsolete”.

Gary Hamel “Leading the revolution”

“Microsoft is always two years away from failure”.

Bill Gates

“There are always two parties-the party of the past and the party of the future, the establishment and the movement”. Which side are you?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Retailing is about change. I can´t think of a single retail concept that hasn´t changed thata is now doing very well. That´s why we have a group in Paris who sit around and do nothing else but think of different ways to do things. Chief among their tasks is to keep our flagships so stunning that people are compelled to walk in. when our customers stroll down Fifth Avenue, we want them to say to themselves,´Should I go to the Museum of Modern Art or should I go to Sephora?´”.

Myron E. Ullman III, architect of Sephora´s international expansion

“Only a fool would make predictions-especially about future!.

Samuel Goldwyn

“The more you pay attention to information that supports your worldview, the less you learn. There tends to be a convergence in what any group of people believe is important, despite what might really be important out there”.

Jim Taylor

“Academics are afraid to go beyond their data. Alfred North Whitehead said that a proposition doesn´t have to be right, it just has to be interesting. Academics don´t understand how liberating it is not to have to be right. When you have to be right you become a prisioner”.

John Naisbitt

“You must have to hang out with the paradoxes, hang out with the contradictions until you understand them. When there is a perceived contradiction, I like to look for something that helps to resolve the contradiction. A lot of people have an either/or mentality. We get the Internet and everyone says, ´Well newspapers are going to go away´. It´s not either/or. There will be a change in the mix, that´s all”.

John Naisbitt

“Companies that are capable of both revolution and renewal are truly resilient-these are the companies that have the best chance of prospering in the tumultuous times that lie ahead…These are the “gray-haired revolutionaries”, and they are the rarest breed of all. Their gray hair comes not from years, but from the experience of having lived through several strategy “lifetimes”. They have done more than extend a legacy or enlarge a franchise. They have repeatedly turned themselves inside out and their industries upside down”.

Gary Hanel, “Leading the revolution”

“I realized that the paralysis I was experiencing had its roots in a flawed paradigm that has guided much of the way we train managers and do research about management-the belief that decisions should be grounded in solid analysis of data. The problem with this paradigm is that when managers attempt to do something that has not been done before, or when the future is going to be different from the past, the paradigm breaks down. Data is only available about the past. I then realized that with data or without it, every time managers take an action, and every time they look into the future, they use a theory to guide their plans and actions-because a theory is a statement of what causes what, and why…Strategy and innovation are somewhere between unguided trial-and-error experimentation and rules-based science…Pattern recognition is the best mode of decision making at this point, given the present state of knowledge. Formulas and rules are not yet feasible”.

Clayton Christensen, Scott Anthony y Erik Roth “Seeing what´s next”

“1. Disruption is a process, not an event.

2. Disruption is a relative phenomenon. What is disruptive to one company may be sustaining to another company.

3. Different or radical technology does not equal disruptive.

4. Disruptive innovations are not limited to high tech markets. Disruption can occur in any product or service market and can even help explain competition among national economies”.

Clayton Christensen, Scott Anthony y Erik Roth

“The motivation/ability framework helps assess how nonmarket forces affect innovation. It shows that there are two necessary inputs to innovation. The first input is motivation, or market incentives. The second input is ability, or the capability to obtain resources, craft them into products and services, and offer those products and services to customers. Markets that have high levels of both ability and motivation tend to have high levels of innovation…Simply stated, the motivation/ability framework suggests innovation flourishes when companies have both the motivation or restrict ability are stifling to innovation. Companies that bring nascent innovations to unfavorable market environments end up either searching for environments that are more favorable or abandoning their efforts”.

Clayton Christensen, Scott Anthony y Erik Roth

“Seeing what´s next”

“Organizations have capabilities that exist independently of the capabilities of the people who work within them. Organizations´ capabilities reside in their processes and their values-and the very processes and values that constitute their core capabilities within the current business model also define their disabilities when confronted with disruption”.

Clayton Christensen

“The Innovator´s Dilemma”

“From the point of view of the relative importance of specific decisions, those of executives properly call for first attention. But from the point of view of aggregate importance, it is not decisions of executives, but of non-executive participants in organizations which should enlist major interest”.

Chester Barnard

“MANAGERS WHO CONFRONT disruptive technological change must be leaders, not followers, in commercializing disruptive technologies. Doing so requires implanting the projects that are to develop such technologies in commercial organizations that match in size the market they are to address. These assertions are based on two key findings of this study: that leadership is more crucial in coping with disruptive technologies than with sustaining ones, and that small, emerging markets cannot solve the near-term growth and profit requirements of large companies”.

Clayton Christensen “The Innovator´s Dilemma”

“The only solution for the problems of range and cost is improved battery technology. To ensure a commercially successful electric vehicle market, the focus of our resources should be on the development of battery technology. Industry efforts such as those through the U.S. Advanced Battery consortium, along with cooperative efforts among all electric vehicle stakeholders-such as utilities, battery companies, environmentalists, regulators and converters-are the most effective way to ensure the marketability of electric vehicles”.

John R. Wallace

Ford Motor Company

“The first step is to recognize that every system was built for a purpose, we didn´t create our organizations just for the sake of their existence. Thus, every action taken by any organ –any part of the organization- should be judged by its impact on the overall purpose. This immediately implies that, before we can deal with the improvement of any section of a system, we must first define the system´s global goal; and the measurements that will enable us to judge the impact of any subsystem and any local decision, on this global goal”.

Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“There is a consensus among scientists that science is not the search for truths or the search for the secrets of nature. We are much more pragmatic than that. The widely accepted approach is to define science as the search for a minimum number of assumptions that will enable us to explain, by direct logical deduction, the maximum number of natural phenomena. These assumptions –like the gravitational law- can never be proven. Even when they can explain an infinite number of phenomena this does not make them true. It simply makes them valid. They can still be disapproved… Science does not concern itself with truths but with validity. That´s the reason why everything in science is open for constant checks and challenges.”

Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“As long as we think that we already know, we don´t bother to rethink the situation.” Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“Behind any logical connection there is an assumption. In our case, most probably it is a hidden assumption.”

Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“What you think is not so important, what your people think you think, that´s what really counts”. Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“The lesson today is loud and clear. Before any function can go on an ego trip, demonstrating and waving results (and by that digging its own grave) –before any function can start individual improvements, all functions should decide together on a common way”.

Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“Most of the factor impacting our ability to increase Throughput, are currently called- intangibles”.

Eliyahu Goldratt, “Theory of Constraints”.

“We traditionally recognize an automaker as a manufacturing-oriented business. GM and Ford are in manufacturing. And we recognize Oracle as a software- oriented business. But let us reconsider the car. Is OnStar, the telematics part of a GM car, hardware or software? Are the computers that manage entertainment, engine functions, climate control, and navigation to be considered software or hardware? Are new paints using passive nanoparticles hardware or software?

So the first distinction that we so often use –hardware and software- may be dated. The same thing may be said of a cell phone. It is hardware or software? Yes, it´s both. This shift is clearly visible with the new and emerging smart phones such as iPhones from Apple, where the entire user interface is software controlled and is likely to be upgraded to its next version through software downloads”.

C.K. Prahalad & M.S. Krishnan, “The new age of innovation”.

“People can have been predicting the end of the paper industry for decades. You´ve heard of the “paperless office”, but have you seen one?”

Jukka Harmala, CEO of Stora Enso.

“Gifford Pinchot´s lists the following “Intrapreneur´s Ten Commandments”:

1.

Come to work each day willing to de fired.
2.

Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.
3.

Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description.
4.

Find people to help you.
5.

Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best.
6.

Work underground as long as you can –publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.
7.

Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.
8.

Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
9.

Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them.
10.

Honor your sponsors”.

Gifford Pinchot, “Intrapreneuring: Why You Don´t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur”.

“The New York Time Company´s “Rules of the Road”:

Success at The New York Times Company means more than achieving our financial and journalistic goals. All of us should conduct ourselves in a manner consistent with the following tenets of behavior:

*

Treat each other with honesty, respect and civility.
*

Strive for excellence –don´t settle for less.
*

Embrace diversity.
*

Contribute your individual excellence to team efforts.
*

Take risks and innovate, recognizing that failure occasionally occurs.
*

Information is power; share it.
*

Accept responsibility, delegate authority.
*

Give and accept constructive feedback.
*

Maintain perspective and sense of humor”.

The New York Times Company.



#
Acerca de Avi

Alberto Levy es Licenciado en Administración, Contador Público y Doctor en Ciencias Económicas, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Master en Psicología Cognitiva, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Master Consultant, Instiute for Organizational Development, Israel. Master Honoris Causa en Dirección de Empresas, Escuela de Negocios del Foro Europeo, España.