Quotes About Flexibility

Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. Or, as March has famously argued, they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.

pair of Jacks. Not much of a hand." "We'll play what we're dealt. That's what we always do.

Successful program management is about choosing a right pathway and owning the advantages and disadvantages of the chosen path, because in the real world the optimal or perfect path doesn't exist.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.

If you can't plan it in advance, you have to see how it goes as you do it

changing the plan at the last moment. "Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can't it? Sure it can." He was talking a mile a minute. "You can put the other thing back

Roosevelt declared, arguing that "the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," he told Congress. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

first foray into politics, Lincoln also pledged that if his opinions on any subject turned out to be erroneous, he stood "ready to renounce them." With this

We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule?

To my mind the whole push and thrust and development of the world is towards the more complex, the flexible, the open-minded, the ability to entertain many ideas, sometimes contradictory ones, in one's mind at the same time.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

He is not immutable. No man can be.

You Scotsmen: you wish to be like the elephant, hacked to pieces for refusing to bow. You should follow my rule: here am I, supple and amenable as a goatskin glove of Vendôme and pleasant to all, Duke and dotard alike.

I have a flexible mind—I believe it's one of the advantages of growing old," she explained. "I find youth quite rigid at times.

There's no sense in trying to fight the last war but one.

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.

She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.

scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.

Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud.

I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.