Matthew Barzun

“We hate the anxiety of uncertainty. Pretending is the price we pay to remove it. So we comfort ourselves with orderly org charts, working backward from a preset destination, factoring out what we can’t measure, tasking team members using “key performance indicators”—monitoring it all with “dashboards,” turning and tuning the dials as if running a machine. It is our way of self-soothing by exerting control and power over whatever and whomever we can.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go

“The leaders of field organizing, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, had put up a makeshift poster that was a reminder to all in the office of what we were doing and how we were doing it: respect, empower, include. It didn’t come from Obama HQ in Chicago, but it spread around the state and eventually to every field office around the country. “Yes We Can” later became the official campaign slogan, but it was respect, empower, include that set the pattern and tone of the campaign, from which flowed bloom loops, interdependence, and the campaign Constellation.”
― Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go