Richard Pascale Quotes

Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action. The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context.

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.

Nothing fails like success.

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.

The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

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.

Knowledge does not advance practice. Rather practice advances knowledge.

Leadership is making happen what wouldn't happen anyway and this always entails working at the edge of what is acceptable

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

Organizations are, in the last analysis, interactions among people.

Contrary to widespread faith in "communication" and "knowledge transfer," information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system they evaporate.

Discoveries from one community cannot be repackaged and provided to another as a silver bullet, That's a "best practice" rollout and it invariably evokes the immune rejection response.

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.

Harnessing adversity is a discipline tailored to a world of unpredictable outcomes--a world where one can disturb, but not wholly direct, a living system. Because the unexpected--adversity--is guaranteed, this discipline is about routinely making lemons into lemon meringue pie.