Lee G. Bolman > Quotes

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“The essence of leadership is not giving things or even providing visions. It is offering oneself and one's spirit.”
― Lee Bolman & Terence Deal

“Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback delayed or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Owen tried to convince fellow capitalists that investing in people could produce a greater return than investments in machinery. But the business world dismissed him as a wild radical whose ideas would harm the people he wanted to help (O'Toole, 1995). Owen was at least 100 years ahead of his time.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“When managers and consultants fail, government frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. In earlier times, the federal government limited its formal influence to national concerns such as the Homestead Act and the Post Office. Now constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” But policymakers often don’t understand the problem well enough to get the solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Peters, 1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers,”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Teams often get launched in a vacuum, with little or no training or support, no changes in the design of their work, and no new systems like e-mail to help communication between teams. Frustrations mount, and people wind up in endless meetings trying to figure out why they are a team and what they are expected to do.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Strong cultures are vigorously and widely supported, and they are difficult to change.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education

“When managers and consultants fail, government frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. In earlier times, the federal government limited its formal influence to national concerns such as the Homestead Act and the Post Office. Now constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” But policymakers often don’t understand the problem well enough to get the solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Peters, 1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers, for example, have been trying for decades to reform U.S. public schools. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. The result? About as successful as America’s switch to the metric system. In the 1950s Congress passed legislation mandating adoption of metric standards and measures. More than six decades later, if you know what a hectare is, or can visualize the size of a three-hundred-gram package of crackers, you’re ahead of most Americans. Legislators did not factor into their solution what it would take to get their decision implemented.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“oan Hilliard could feel the smile on her face as she stepped from
her car. Not the best wheels, but they were hers, a token of four
years spent working in a brokerage firm. Joan had always wanted to
be a teacher, but she had finished college at the wrong time. To her
great disappointment, she couldn’t land a teaching position. She had
still wanted her own classroom but decided that any job was better
than nothing. The brokerage firm paid well, and she felt better for the
experience. She had learned about herself, how to work with other
adults, and what life at work was all about. Above all, she felt more
confident. She had learned to cope in a demanding and stressful adult
environment. That experience ought to help in a classroom of kids.
She was delighted to get a teaching assignment at Pico School.
It looked like a friendly place from the outside. The surrounding
neighborhood was in decline, but Pico boasted green lawns, welltrimmed shrubbery, and large, lattice-paned windows. Built in the
1950s, it had the architectural charm that Joan remembered from
the schools of her childhood. As she walked through the arched
entryway, she noticed the vaguely familiar smells of new wax and
summer mustiness. As she turned down the corridor leading to the
principal’s office, she ran into a tall, broad-shouldered man with
hands on hips, scrutinizing the newly polished sheen on the floor.
This had to be the custodian, admiring his work before hundreds of
students’feet turned it into a mosaic of scuff marks.
As she moved closer, he looked up and smiled as if he had”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing the Path to School Leadership: A Guide for Teachers and Principals

“conceptual heart. But we have incorporated new research and revised our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“The members of Team Six “are bound together not only by sworn oaths, but also by the obligations of their brotherhood” (Pfarrer, 2011, p. 28). As one team member described it, “My relationship with Team Six has been more important than my marriage” (Wadsin and Templin, p. 254). Published”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“On some deep level, we may choose to fill our days with busy work as a way to avoid the inevitable pain and disappointment in accepting that who we are may not be who we thought we were.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education

“Significance is built through the use of many expressive and symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories, and music. An organization without a rich symbolic life grows empty and barren. The magic of special occasions is vital in building significance into collective life. Moments of ecstasy are parentheses that mark life’s major passages. Without ritual and ceremony, transition remains incomplete, a clutter of comings and goings; “life becomes an endless set of Wednesdays” (Campbell, 1983, p. 5).”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Targeting individuals, while ignoring larger system failures, oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

“Gupta and Jobs were both brilliant men who accomplished extraordinary things. But each descended into a period of cluelessness, becoming so cocooned in his own world view that he couldn’t see other options. That’s what it means to be clueless. You don’t know what’s going on, but you think you do, and you don’t see better choices. So you do more of what you know, even though it’s not working. You hope in vain that if you just try harder, you’ll succeed.”
― Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership