Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership

"Knowing how people grow, for example, does not mean we know how to grow them. Experts in child development are no better than anyone else at raising their own children." (p. 40)
"Absurd as it seems, the way to judge your effectiveness is to assess the quality of the discontent you engender, the ability to produce movement from low-order discontent to high-order discontent." (p. 94)
"Real creativity, the kind that is responsible for breakthrough changes in our society, always violates the rules. That is why it is so unmanageable and that is why, in most organizations, when we say we desire creativity we really mean manageable creativity. We don't mean raw, dramatic, radical creativity that requires us to change." (p. 103)
"While they might like to think they are organized for creativity, companies that are sizable and think of themselves as permanent cannot encourage creative acts as well as a new and relatively temporary organization can." (p. 104)
"It presents us with the paralysing absurdity that the situations we try hardest to avoid in our organizations would actually be the most beneficial for them." (p. 126)
"The best leaders make their organizations places where their passion becomes the organizing force. 'Amateur' stems from the Latin word amator, which means 'lover'. Amateurs do what they do out of love. That is a word that does not often arise in conversation about management development, yet love is fundamental to good leadership, because leadership is all about caring. Indeed, caring is the basis for community, and the first job of the leader is to build community, a deep feeling of unity, a fellowship
* One of the great dilemmas is that the erosion of community almost always happens in the name of progress
* Once the human organization gets to be large-scale, it is difficult to make it work as effectively as it did when it was smaller. That is the reason for the current move to more entrepreneurial organizations. There are those who feel that the future of organizations will be in a reversion to small units because, for one thing, only in smaller units are the bonds holding people together affectional rather than simply functional, and affection is the basis of community. For example, only prisons housing fewer than twenty inmates are likely to be rehabilitative*leadership is like being in love." (p. 159) Whenever I have the arrogance or audacity to believe that I can reform people, I get nowhere. But when I fundamentally recognize that I cannot possibly accomplish those reforms, I can move ahead with a more humble posture and, paradoxically, perhaps then there is a chance that the situation can change. The absurd lesson is to recognize that it is a lost cause and work on it anyway." (p. 164)

from Richard Farson's "Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership".