Quotes About Flexibility

We throw people into launching and supporting change initiatives and projects and we just assume that life and past experiences have been a good teacher for everybody to pick up today's relevant insights and skills. But we have seen again and again that this is not necessarily true when you have to change more often and in bigger ways. Life—which means the past—can be a pretty bad teacher.

We need to become less like an elephant and more like a customer-friendly Tyrannosaurus rex

Discernment emerges from understanding the nature of the conflict and what level of response is needed to deal with it adequately. Creativity is needed for flexibility and innovation.

Technology makes things faster and more cost-effective, but it's not perfect. It requires you to be as flexible as you can be.

scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience.

People don't resist change. They resist being changed! ~ Peter Senge

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got. ~ Peter F. Drucker

It was only in the 1990s, in Bosnia, that "the Che Guevara of Islam"43 really came into his own, developing al-Qa'ida into the flexible, well-funded multinational jihadi organization it became. It was the Bosnian civil war that transformed bin Laden and his cadres into the backbone of the mujahidin worldwide.

True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.

Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?

Life is a caravan, and on this journey we sleep in many tents. Tomorrow I shall sleep in a different tent.

It takes a loose rein to keep a marriage tight.

It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind's eye closed.

Governments must be made for human beings as they are, or as they are capable of speedily becoming.

As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.

Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don't like having to bring them with me to the stove. My goal as a cook has always been not so much to attain some specific sense of mastery as to be able to just go into the kitchen, take up what I find there, and make a meal of it.

The possibilities were too varied to allow reasonable planning.

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stiff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they have always been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

Think and let think.

Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.

Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out.

The leader does the planning, but he's wise enough not to say so. As the changes become necessary, he slips them in as a concession – temporary, of course – to circumstances, but if he's good, he's slipping in the right bits for the ultimate shape.

I'm not bigoted enough to twist facts to suit what I've been taught.

I'm not bigoted enough to twist the facts to suit what I've been taught.