Almost forgot to blog tonight! Thank goodness for iPad, or I’d have to get out of bed.
While pondering what I would write about tonight, I idly looked through my Sony ereader for inspiration. (I no longer have piles of books next to my bed. These days I have my iPad and my trusty Sony ereader instead.)
Going through the Sony, I realize I have been highlighting and saving* passages in some of the books I’ve been reading, but I haven’t necessarily referred to them again later. It was interesting to look at the passages I’ve marked – and to look at the books I’ve been dipping into, too.
We participate, he [organizational theorist Karl Weick] noted, in the creation of our organizational realities: “The environment that the organization worries about is out there by the organization.” … There is no objective reality; the environment we experience does not exist “out there.” It is co-created through our acts of observation, what we choose to notice and worry about.
Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Berrett-Koehler, 1999 (2nd Ed.)
So don’t ask yourself how you can influence the culture, but rather how you are already influencing it. Are you consciously creating a miniculture around yourself according to your own design, or are you unwittingly training and retraining others to follow the negative aspects of the broader environment? In other words, are you a beneficiary of precedent or a slave to it?
Ed Muzio, Make Work Great, McGraw-Hill, 2010
There’s a theme here… Currently reading Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford.
*My Sony ereader has a touch screen and allows you to highlight and annotate what you’re reading; it also handily saves all these notes in a neat list.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad