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Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.
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The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
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We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.
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An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.
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Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
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An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.
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The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
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When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.
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All imaginable futures are not equally possible.
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It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
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One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.
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The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.
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Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.
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Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.