by Ted Eytan, on 12 Sep 2006 06:50 am
The Journey
One more quote, for fun
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I just finished reading: O’Toole J, Lawler EE. The new American workplace. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2006.
There’s a nice discussion at the end about the rationale that American executives have used to justify various choices made in involving and empowering employees. It has typically boiled down to “I have no choice. Everyone else is doing it.”
The quote is
The statement “I have no alternative” is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure in government, business, or any institution. Great leaders use their strategic and moral imaginations to create viable options where others see none. When there appears to be no choice but to take an action that is negative for a key constituent, imaginative leaders look for alternatives that haven’t been tried or for ones that others assume “won’t work.” In business, such leaders take the extra step and search for actions that serve all their stakeholders.
I like this because it meshes well with one of the quotes I’ve been using since we started this work: “Not everything has been tried before.”