Noah

“As with any target, in the pursuit of this purpose managers actually make performance worse—by ‘managing costs,’ for example, they create (more) costs. If only they knew. In pursuit of economies of scale, managers of service organizations build factories to handle work and worsen service, but they remain unaware of the extent of the damage, because their measures, being activity- rather than purpose-related, keep them blind. Top-down”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“A central tenet of the traditional command-and-control mentality is management by the numbers; this is the basis and means for decision making. The numbers are largely financial and activity-related (what people do), which may or may not be of value to understanding and improving the system. With a proclaimed interest in ‘shareholder value,’ senior managers sit astride a system that they make more unstable and suboptimal through financial interference. Almost without thinking about it, the purpose of the organization becomes ‘make the budget.’ As”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism