Management of the Absurd LO16458

Scott Ott (SOTT@nkcsd.k12.mo.us)
Wed, 07 Jan 1998 13:25:34 -0600

Below are some quotes from Richard Farson's "Management of the Absurd:
Paradoxes in Leadership". If you are interested in more excerpts (FREE),
send e-mail to sott@nkcsd.k12.mo.us Put the word "absurd" (without
quotation marks) in the subject line and/or message line. You will
receive a return e-mail with excerpts attached as a MS-Word document. If
you cannot open such a document, send me a note and we'll find a
compatible format.

Here are some sample excerpts from Farson's book...

"Knowing how people grow, for example, does not mean we know how to grow
them. Experts in child development are no better than anyone else at
raising their own children." (p. 40)

"Absurd as it seems, the way to judge your effectiveness is to assess the
quality of the discontent you engender, the ability to produce movement
from low-order discontent to high-order discontent." (p. 94)

"Real creativity, the kind that is responsible for breakthrough changes in
our society, always violates the rules. That is why it is so unmanageable
and that is why, in most organizations, when we say we desire creativity
we really mean manageable creativ ity. We don't mean raw, dramatic,
radical creativity that requires us to change." (p. 103)

"While they might like to think they are organized for creativity,
companies that are sizable and think of themselves as permanent cannot
encourage creative acts as well as a new and relatively temporary
organization can." (p. 104)

"It presents us with the paralyzing absurdity that the situations we try
hardest to avoid in our organizations would actually be the most
beneficial for them." (p. 126)

"The best leaders make their organizations places where their passion
becomes the organizing force. 'Amateur' stems from the Latin word amator,
which means 'lover'. Amateurs do what they do out of love. That is a word
that does not often arise in conversation about management development,
yet love is fundamental to good leadership, because leadership is all
about caring. Indeed, caring is the basis for community, and the first job
of the leader is to build community, a deep feeling of unity, a
fellowship* One of the great dilemmas is that the erosion of community
almost always happens in the name of progress*Once the human organization
gets to be large-scale, it is difficult to make it work as effectively as
it did when it was smaller. That is the reason for the current move to
more entrepreneurial organizations. There are those who feel that the
future of organizations will be in a reversion to small units because, for
one thing, only in smaller units are the bonds holding people together
affectional rather than simply functional, and affection is the basis of
community. For example, only prisons housing fewer than twenty inmates are
likely to be rehabilitative*leadership is like being in love." (p. 159)

"Whenever I have the arrogance or audacity to believe that I can reform
people, I get nowhere. But when I fundamentally recognize that I cannot
possibly accomplish those reforms, I can move ahead with a more humble
posture and, paradoxically, perhaps then there is a chance that the
situation can change. The absurd lesson is to recognize that it is a lost
cause and work on it anyway." (p. 164)

Grace & Peace,
Scott Ott

-- 

"Scott Ott" <SOTT@nkcsd.k12.mo.us>

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