Noah

“As managers develop the systems approach, they learn to use computers for the things they are good at and to the contrary avoid using computers for things that people are good at. The consequences are fewer computer systems and more control. I”
― 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

“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

“White history is implied in the absence of its acknowledgment; white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism