Thursday, January 22, 2009

When organizations fossilize, they die

Thanks to colleague Chuck Peters for passing along a wonderful blog about why change is so important to keep organizations vibrant and alive. It couldn't be more relevant to newspapers where staffs struggle with the smallest inkling of change. The following excerpt comes from the blog "the brand builder" and notes the fragilty of ideas, and the need to keep experimenting and changing.

“I have never stabilized an organization. Crystallizing an organization is freezing the energy. In chemistry, instability is very good because it creates some combinations you don’t expect.”

“Without change, there is fossilization,and that’s the worst thing that can happen.”

“Ideas,are so fragile, so tenuous, that managers must destroy layers that can obscure or damage them. If you have an organization that is too administrative, you are just killing the ideas. As we say in France, when you ask a committee to draw a horse, you get a camel.”

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