This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The key question for a leader is, ‘What can I do in this organization that nobody else can do?’ And several questions emerge from that: ‘What did the good Lord ordain me for? What are my strengths? Where have I seen results?’ Very few of us ask these questions because very few of us even know how we perform. What am I good at? We don't usually ask that question. We've been trained to notice our weaknesses, not our strengths. Schools, of necessity, are remedial institutions. When teachers meet with parents, rarely do they say, ‘Your Johnny should do more writing. He's so talented in writing.’ Now, more likely you'll hear, ‘Johnny needs more work on his math. He's a bit weak in that area.’ As a result, few of us really know our strengths. The great teachers, and great leaders, recognize strengths and focus on them.
Focus | Good | Lord | Organization | Question | Work | Leader |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The dictionary -- which, unlike the computer, is an essential leadership tool -- contains multiple definitions of the word mission; the most appropriate here is, "purpose, reason for being." Vision, by contrast, is "a picture or image of the future we seek to create," and values articulate how we intend to live as we pursue our mission. Paradoxically, if an organization's mission is truly motivating it is never really achieved. Mission provides an orientation, not a checklist of accomplishments. It defines a direction, not a destination. It tells the members of an organization why they are working together, how they intend to contribute to the world. Without a sense of mission, there is no foundation for establishing why some intended results are more important than others.
Future | Important | Mission | Organization | Reason | Sense | Leadership |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The 21st century will be the century of the social sector organization. The more economy, money, and information become global, the more community will matter. And only the social sector nonprofit organization performs in the community, exploits its opportunities, mobilizes its local resources, and solves its problems. The leadership, competence, and management of the social sector nonprofit organization will thus largely determine the values, the vision, the cohesion, and the performance of the 21st century society.
Organization | Will |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members’ awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform.
Ability | Awareness | Organization | Awareness |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it... This then, is the basic meaning of a learning organization -an organization that is continuously expanding its capacity to create its future. Survival learning or what is more often called adaptive learning is important - indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, adaptive learning must be joined by generative learning, learning that enhances our capacity to create.
Capacity | Important | Learning | Meaning | Organization | Relationship | Survival | World |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them – in effect; they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.
Discipline | Learning | Life | Life | Organization | Reality | Work |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
There is a big difference between having a mission statement and being truly mission-based. To be truly mission-based means that key decisions can be referred back to the mission -- our reason for being. It means that people can and should object to management edicts that they do not see as connected to the mission...In most organizations, no one would dream of challenging a management decision on the grounds that it does not serve the mission. In other words, most organizations serve those in power rather than a mission. [The mission] says rather, that the source of legitimate power in the organization is its guiding ideas...The cornerstone of a truly democratic system of governance is not voting or any other particular mechanism. It is the belief that power ultimately flows from ideas, not people. To be truly mission-based is to be democratic in this way, to make the mission more important than the boss, something that not too many corporations have yet demonstrated an ability to do.
Ability | Belief | Decision | Important | Means | Mission | Object | Organization | People | Power | Reason | System |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects … when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement — at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist.
Authority | Destroy | Organization | Society | Time | Society |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
That is why Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement — at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist. Only, instead of demanding that those social customs should be maintained through the authority of a few, it demands it from the continued action of all.
Action | Authority | Destroy | Organization | Society | Time | Society |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The first constant in the job of management is to make human strength effective and human weaknesses irrelevant. That's the purpose of any organization, the one thing an organization does that individuals can't do better. The second constant is that managers are accountable for results, period. They are not being paid to be philosophers; they are not even being paid for their knowledge. They are paid for results. Management is not a branch of philosophy but a practice… and results are not quite as easy to define in an organization. The balance between short term and long term, for instance, will remain a constant challenge
Balance | Organization | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | Will |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
The globalized organization of work, profiting from the extreme privation of developing peoples, often entails grave situations that mock the elementary demands of human dignity.
Extreme | Grave | Organization |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
The United Nations organization has proclaimed 1979 as the Year of the Child. Are the children to receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?
Children | Nations | Organization | Race | Receive |
Posidonius, aka Posidonius of Rhodes or Posidonius of Apameia (meaning "of Poseidon") NULL
Whilst some Stoics condemned wealth and the acquisitions of goods as inherently evil, just as they shunned political and social life as an irresistible invitation to moral corruption, Posidonius held that these things were neither good nor evil in themselves. As an active participant in the organization of kosmos, the individual should not fear either material goods or the life of the polis. Rather, he should be vigilant in the use to which he puts his resources and energies. Simple withdrawal from the world is too passive for the Posidonian man: correct participation in all things is the cosmopolitan ideal which signals inner withdrawal from the inferior daimon in the soul. It is not enough, then, to recognize wise men and immoral men – one must know the soul-characteristics of the wise man so that one can through emulation of them make moral progress. By separating Fate from Zeus, Posidonius firmly renounced rigid determinism while being fully aware of the forces at work in the world. Moral progress is possible because man, as a participant in the divine and informing governance of kosmos, can work to adjust, over the long term, Fate itself. Although kosmos cannot be understood in terms of some fantastic eschatology, moral progress (and therefore a movement towards authentic philosophical happiness) is possible because the organization of kosmos is capable of degrees of improvement. Change occurs as man learns to participate in cosmic activity – becoming cosmopolitan in a transcendental sense – by turning from the lower and embracing the rational daimon in himself. He achieves this through the selfless and assiduous performance of his duties. [paraphrased]
Change | Evil | Fate | Fear | Good | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Men | Organization | Progress | Sense | Wealth | Wise | Work | World | Fate |
If this planet has been what geology teaches it has been,--a planet fuller of coarser, cruder, and more violent forces than now; abounding in forms of coarser vegetable, animal, and even human life and organization than now; of which its present condition is a refinement and improvement as regards vegetable, animal, and man,--is not this the suggestion, the hint, the proof, of a still greater refinement and improvement for the future; a refinement and improvement going on now?
Improvement | Life | Life | Organization | Present | Refinement |
R. W. Sellars, fully Roy Wood Sellars
Another weakness of materialism was its whole-hearted identification of itself with the principles of elementary mechanics. It was naively scientific. We may call this species of materialism reductive materialism. . . . By its very principle evolutionary materialism is opposed to reductive materialism. It is not finalistic, or teleological, in the old sense . . . but it does not hold that relations in nature are external and that things are machines of atomic complexity. Organization and wholes are genuinely significant.
Machines | Materialism | Nature | Organization | Principles | Sense | Weakness | Old |
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
The sciences of observation and experiment are alike in this, that their aim is to detect the constant or recurring features in all events of a certain kind. A meteorologist studies one cyclone in order to compare it with others ; and by studying a number of them he hopes to find out what features in them are constant, that is, to find out what cyclones as such are like. But the historian has no such aim. If you find him on a certain occasion studying the Hundred Years War or the Revolution of 1688, you cannot infer that he is in the preliminary stages of an inquiry whose ultimate aim is to reach conclusions about wars or revolutions as such. If he is in the preliminary stages of any inquiry, it is more likely to be a general study of the Middle Ages or the seventeenth century. This is because the sciences of observation and experiment are organized in one way and history is organized in another. In the organization of meteorology, the ulterior value of what has been observed about one cyclone is conditioned by its relation to what has been observed about other cyclones. In the organization of history, the ulterior value of what is known about the Hundred Years War is conditioned, not by its relation to what is known about other wars, but by its relation to what is known about other things that people did in the Middle Ages.
Events | Experiment | History | Inquiry | Observation | Order | Organization | People | Revolution | Study | War | Value |
The Red Cross in its nature, it aims and purposes, and consequently, its methods, is unlike any other organization in the country. It is an organization of physical action, of instantaneous action, at the spur of the moment; it cannot await the ordinary deliberation of organized bodies if it would be of use to suffering humanity... it has by its nature a field of its own. [Clara Barton]
Aims | Deliberation | Nature | Organization | Suffering | Deliberation |
Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.
Lord | Organization |
This commission is a political organization designed to support the two major parties and shut out third party and independent candidates... We need to reinvigorate our democracy by having real debates -- not joint press conferences designed to limit the voices heard by voters.
Democracy | Need | Organization |
Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense...the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war...The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history - war.
Cooperation | Government | Health | History | Obedience | Organization | Society | Uniformity | Society | Government |