“No company starts out as a cumbrous bureaucracy, but most end up that way. As an organization grows, layers get added, staff groups swell, rules proliferate, and compliance costs mount. Once a company hits a certain threshold of complexity — around two to three hundred employees — bureaucracy starts growing faster than the organization itself.” — Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, […]

“Competition and cooperation are not contraries. They have no opposite meaning. They are complimentary. In every aspect of life, we do both. Schools are highly cooperative endeavours within which scholars vigorously compete. The Olympic Games combine immense cooperation in structure and rules with intense competition in events. As the runners leap from the blocks, competition

“Past success can breed complacency and constrain future innovation.” — Robert Alexander Burgelman Imagine you’re a fighter pilot in a chaotic dogfight, adrenaline surging as you zero in on an enemy plane. Your vision tunnels on that target, and you start to lose awareness of everything else. Pilots call this target fixation — becoming so focused on one object

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks one character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” (via Paul Nunes, in “Big Bang Disruption”) That sentence explains so many collapses in life: waistlines, empires, reputations. One biscuit at a time. One skipped workout. One more justification. I

“The Map is not the Territory” — Alfred Korzybski For generations, the German village of Mödlareuth lived as one. A narrow brook — the Tannbach — trickled through its centre, technically dividing Bavaria from Thuringia. But for the people who called it home, it was simply a stream. They crossed it daily to attend school, share meals, marry neighbours, and bury their

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw Imagine you’ve washed ashore on a distant, unknown island. You’re immediately faced with a local tribe whose intentions are unclear. Your next move could be the

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” — Thomas Carlyle In the early 1900s, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured Europe with his amazing horse, Clever Hans. Hans could apparently solve math problems and even read German, tapping out answers with his hoof to the delight of crowds. A government

“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.” — Seneca “Why did you say ‘brother’ to people who aren’t your brother?” [Referring to how I addressed people at The Reinvention Summit]. My son’s breakfast-time question hung in the air, innocent yet profound. How could I explain this ingrained

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.” — Maxwell Maltz “The external world is an echo of your internal world.” — Tom Asacker Organizations, like individuals, are guided by self-image. They act not based on external reality, but on what they believe themselves to be. If a company sees itself as an industrial manufacturer, it

“If you give a ton of gold to an ant, it will only crush the ant.” — Sadhguru The fastest route to innovation is not through resourcing. You can’t throw money, people, and infrastructure at a problem and expect it to disappear. Yet, that’s exactly what many organisations do. Like a child handed every toy at once,