May 6, 2012

The kindness of others

"Kindness is, or ought to be like background radiation, ever-present in our lives. The main and most effective way we learn about kindness is to experience the kindness of others. It seems obvious, after all children who are treated with affection are more likely to grow up to be kind than those whose parents are emotionally neglectful or abusive. It is not enough for kindness to be taught as a clinical skill, to be used in the taking of a medical history, the personal care of an elderly patient or in counselling. We need institutions and cultures where people are kind to each other, where kindness is valued and nurtured in everything we do. Unless we are routinely subject to the kindness of others we will have little kindness to share ourselves. The kindness of others sustains our own."

Posted by richard at 5:33 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2012

We live in a complex world

"The mainstream ways of thinking about management are based on the sciences of certainty. The whole system of strategic choice, goal setting and choosing actions to reach the given goals in a controlled way depends on predictability. The problem is that this familiar causal foundation cannot explain the reality we face. Almost daily, we experience the inability of people to choose what happens in their organizations - or in their countries. We live in a complex world. Things may appear orderly over time, but are inherently unpredictable.

Complexity refers to a pattern, a movement in time that is at the same time predictable and unpredictable, knowable and unknowable. Healthy, ordinary, everyday life is always complex, no matter what the situation is. There is absolutely no linearity in the world of human beings.

Human patterns that lose this complexity become repetitive and rapidly inappropriate for dealing with life. Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity. An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life. For example, a failing heart is typically characterized by increasing loss of complexity."

Esko Kilpi

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April 15, 2012

A good enough outcome

"Forest management is unexpectedly complex. The regimented plantation proved as unsuccessful as the planned city, and ecologists today are tearing such plantations down. Monocultural forests are not only dull to look at, but vulnerable to disease and fire. Managed woodlands are economically and environmentally superior. But no one knows the best way to manage a forest, or even what "best" means in this context. Our objective in a complex system is not to find the optimum, because no one can know before or after whether such an optimum has been achieved. We can and should be satisfied with an outcome that is good enough.

What is true of forests is equally true of businesses. The great corporations of the modern world were not built by people whose overriding interest was wealth, profit, or shareholder value. To paraphrase Mill: their focus was on business followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they found profit by the way.

This is how Hewlett Packard described it: "Profit is a cornerstone of what we do... but it has never been the point in and of itself. The point, in fact, is to win, and winning is judged in the eyes of the customer and by doing something you can be proud of.""

John Kay

Posted by richard at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2012

My kind of economics

"I think we need a bigger, more integrated view that economists tended to look for, in the past. We have to see the totality of the concerns that make human beings want a good economy. The kind of economic thinking that I would like to see pays a lot more attention to issues of human freedom. What I have in mind is real freedom, not just formal liberties but also what kind of lives people manage to achieve, what they can do with their lives, and what help of the state they need for more substantive freedom. The basic question economists should ask themselves is: What can we do to have a decent society where people get much more freedom to live the kind of lives of which they would have reason to be proud and happy."

Amartya Sen

Posted by richard at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)