M. Scott Peck Quotes

In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.

Large, centralized organizations foster alienation like stagnant ponds breed algae.

There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany. We need to study such models and promising pathways on which our existing decisionmaking procedures can be gradually reformed.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

Too many of the organizations I have observed resemble a farm in Kansas. They have lots of fences and silos as well as a storm cellar.

After the '57 initial meeting - I was up this way working, not as a staff person - there became the need for a much more definite organized office. What you'd had prior to that time were these big meetings in different places, and there was nobody to pull anything together. Everything was left to [Martin Luther] King and the group that was around him.

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.

Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization—a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

The idea of dates, boxes, categories are very scary for me.

The first goal of the technostructure is its own security.

People are not "things" to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not "human resources." They are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

Least of all shall we preserve democracy or foster its growth if all the power and most of the important decisions rest with an organization far too big for the common man to survey or comprehend.

Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.

All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done, they destroy things.

Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

Just media alone is not enough. You have to have organization.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

Whatever the country, whatever the culture, whatever the time, when you become a big enough organization, you start to collapse and slow down.

The primary asset of any business is its organization.

Big institutions in this imperial state, in this evil US empire, prepare their politicians to become criminals.

When it's time to focus in and play ball during the season, 100% of my focus is on that. When it's the offseason and I've got time to be away and I can do other interests - they don't conflict. I'm good at compartmentalizing. I can put everything in its appropriate box at the time and open it up when I need to at a later time.