Hazel Henderson Quotes

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.

The brain adapts very quickly. It is incredible how quickly we can adapt and what progress we can make in a very short time.

Does management resist the institutional imperative?

The Civil Service is a bit like a rusty weathercock. It moves with opinion then it stays where it is until another wind moves it in a different direction

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Entrenched bureaucracies are always opposed to fundamental changes.

Historically speaking, institutions are slow to change and usually resistant to any sudden moves - churches especially so.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face

As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

There’s a carrying capacity in any society for how much change it can incorporate at any one time.

I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.

In an organization that is unwilling to change, find the opportunity to talk and interact with people - figure out why they don't want to change. It could be habits. It could be people's personal equities and reputations are defined by the role they're in or the process they've mastered.

Some of the beauty of a university is that every professor is given a lot of autonomy over what he or she does. That's also what makes it very hard for even a very forward-thinking president to change courses.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.

Rather marvelously, the older brain only permits change when it judges that change to be important, rewarding or good for it.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

Even talking about change can be threatening to entrenched interests...Careers in the Pentagon, the board room, or the halls of Congress are not advanced by creating the disruptions that go with real change, so there are very few voices willing to speak up for the future and move beyond rhetoric to make serious choices.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

The thing that is probably most important is having a brain, and to be able to figure things out and learn things very rapidly.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

A change imposed is a change opposed.

Here I am: My brain is open.