[596] in magellan
Change
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Fri Feb 16 14:01:27 2001
Message-ID: <3A8D7983.606FDA6A@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 14:03:31 -0500
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
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To: discovery@mit.edu, itlt@mit.edu, magellan@mit.edu
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I thought I would share a recent exchange; first is a quote that Joanne
Hallisey passed along from "A Survival Guide to the Stress of
Organizational Change" by Price Pritchett and Ron Pound. Also included
is a message from Tim with a follow-up thought from his current reading.
As we continue to make hard decisions, I find these thoughts both
reassuring and challenging - personally and organizationally.
Greg
------------------------
Joanne wrote:
I was looking over some of my material on change when I came across
Basic Mistake #8 "Fail to Abandon the Expendable". These two pages (19
and 20) in the Pritchett and Pound booklet have some comments that
might apply to the recent ACS off site. The Survival Guide says the
following:
<center>Reengineer your job.
Eliminate unnecessary steps,
get rid of busywork,
and unload activities that don't
contribute enough
to the organization's current goals.
Focus your efforts on
doing "the right things."
And ditch those duties
that don't count much,
even if you can do them
magnificently right.
</center>This is followed by a Steven Wright quote. "you can't have
everything. Where would you put it?"
--------------------------
Tim wrote:
I've just finished a very interesting little book -- the only
kind I can read at this stage of my life -- called Orbiting
the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with
Grace. One of the parables in the book has some similar thoughts
related to creativitiy, but which might be useful in guiding
us through changes:
"To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage
and willingness to let go:
Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past...
Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions...
Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood...
Let go of so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.
...
Now when I say _let_go_, I do not mean _reject_. Because when
you let go of something, it will still be there for you when you
need it. But because you have stopped clinging, you will have
freed yourself up to tap into other possibilities -- possibilities
that can help you deal with this world of accelerating change.
