Chapter 3

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Principle 1: Philosophy of Long-Term Systems Thinking

We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent—attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines.

—Margaret J. Wheatley, Finding Our Way:Leadership for an Uncertain Time

PHILOSOPHY IS THE MORAL COMPASS OF THE ORGANIZATION

In 1992 I was codirecting the Japan Technology Management Program at the University of Michigan to study and transfer knowledge from Japan to the United States. We were obligated to share what ...

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