Gary Cohen

“here is the weirdest thing in all of personality research: Studies of twins and adoptive children consistently show that shared environment effects are virtually zero. In other words, once you account for the effects of genes, the shared environmental effects that nearly everybody believes to be so important for the development of personality are vanishingly small—effectively nil in most studies. If my last two sentences do not surprise you, then you are not reading carefully enough (or else you took a course in personality psychology once upon a time and you have already wrapped your mind around these surprising findings). According to the research, the reason that identical (momozygotic [MZ]) twins are so similar to each other in personality traits is that they have all their genes in common. The fact that they happen to have grown up in the same family adds nothing to the similarity.”
― Dan P. McAdams, The Art and Science of Personality Development

“As an aside, Sheldon Rovin in his first draft of a guide to Systems Thinking, repeated this old chestnut: The often-quoted tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, ‘When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as: 1. Buying a stronger whip. 2. Changing riders. 29 3. Appointing a committee to study the horse. 4.    Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses. 5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included. 6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living impaired. 7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse. 82 8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed. 9. Providing extra funding/training to increase the dead horse’s performance. 10.  Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance. 3 11.  Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than live horses. 12.  Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And, of course… 13.  Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.”
― Russell L. Ackoff, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: With 40 New Management f-Laws

“But habits get you only half the way there. According to Aristotle, habits paved the way for the eventual development of character (in Greek, ethos). To express a virtuous character, a person must engage in rational and deliberative choice, and then act upon the choice: “Acts that are incidentally virtuous [should be] distinguished from those that are done knowingly, of choice, and by a virtuous disposition” (Aristotle, 2004, p.”
― Dan P. McAdams, The Art and Science of Personality Development

“You rarely improve an organisation as a whole by improving the performance of one or more of its parts”
― Russell L. Ackoff, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: With 40 New Management f-Laws