Dee Hock's MiniMaxims

I like Mamading‘s quotes website Quotessence.

I’ve already pointed him at Dancing with Systems and Permaculture Principles, encouraging him to include the wisdom they contain.

Now I want to share Dee Hock‘s MiniMaxims from his great book, Birth of the Chaordic Age.

[amtap book:isbn=1576750744]

• “Particularity and serparability are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics of the universe”
• “Desire to command and control is a death wish. Absolute control is in the coffin”
• “Only fools worship their tools”
• “Life is a gift, bearing a gift, which is the art of giving”
• “The doing of the doing is why nothing gets done”
• “Management expertise has become the creation and control of constants, uniformity, and efficiency, while the need has become the understanding and coordination of variability, complexity, and effectiveness”
• “Compelled behaviour is the essence of tyranny. Induced behaviour is the essence of leadership. Both may have the same objective, but one tends to evil, the other to good”
• “Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, employ good people, and free them to do the same. All else is trivia”
• “Success, while it may build confidence, teaches an insidious lesson: to have too high an opinion of self”
• “The most abundant, least expensive, most underutilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity”
• “There isn’t any poor work; there’s only work poorly done, poorly recognized, or poorly paid”
• “You can learn much from what people say, but more is revealed by what they do not say. Listen as carefully to the silence as the sound”
• “Haste never made time, and waste never made abundance”
• “The past is ever less predictive, the future ever less predictable, and the present scarcely exists at all”
• “Life will never surrender its secretes to yardsticks”
• “Healthy organizations induce behavior. Unhealthy organizations compel it”
• “People deprived of self-organization and self-governance are inherently ungovernable”
• “Perspective is the Achilles heel of the mind, distorting everything we think, know, believe, or imagine”
• “True power is never used. If you use power, you never really have it”
• “If you think you can’t, why think”
• “Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations”
• “Until someone has repeatedly said no and adamantly refuses another word on the subject, they are in the process of saying yes and don’t know it”
• “I am as great to me as you are to you, and you are as great to you as I am to me, therefore, we are equal”
• “Corporations are a great place to make love to capitalization of gain in one bedroom and socialization of cost in the other”
• “You can’t count the steps to heaven, or calculate the slide to hell”
• “Never confuse activity with productivity. It’s what come out the other end of the pipe that’s important, not what you push into it”
• “Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things”
• “Beware the Four Beasts that inevitably devour their keeper: Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition”
• “Substance is enduring, form ephemeral. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference”
• “A clear sense of direction and compelling principles about conduct in pursuit of it are far more effective than long-term plans and detailed objectives”
• “The greater the capacity to receive, store, utilize, transform, and transmit information, the more diverse and complex the entity”
• “Fear is an internal narcotic that paralyzes mind, body, and spirit. The power of things we fear lies solely in our opinion of them”
• “When we fish for absolutes in the seas of uncertainty, all we catch are doubts”
• “If life on earth depends on wolf or man, take the wolf every time”
• “Language, invented to reveal meaning, is more often used to confound or conceal it”
• “Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership – it’s bookkeeping”
• “Change is the thief of identity. We can never be sure of our place or value in a new order of things”
• “A bit of carbon in iron makes powerful metal; a bit of truth in a lie makes powerful deceit”
• “It is enough that error be corrected. It is excessive to insist it be admitted”
• “With the will to succeed and the grace to compromise, all things become possible”
• “Money motivates neither the best people nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit”
• “People must come to things in their own time, in their own way, for their own reasons, or they never truly come at all”
• “Judgment is a muscle of the mind, developed by exercise. There is nothing to lose by trusting it”
• “Wool should be grown on the hide, not in the head”
• “Leadership is to go before and show the way”
• “Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes; provided that one can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise about it, and try again”
• “Mistakes are toothless little things if you recognize them. If you ignore or defend them, they grow fangs and bite”
• “You can’t tickle yourself. It’s a social act”
• “Fame is fool’s gold of the ego; as soon threadbare and out of fashion as a suit of clothes”
• “All distinctions are useful, but none are truth or reality”
• “The surest way to satisfy the greed of the few is to arouse it in the many”
• “Money is not the measure of man”
• “A life can’t be made of denial. A life is made of affirmation”
• “The eternal, internal light casts no shadow”