A Quote by Russell L. Ackoff

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

Russell L. Ackoff

Quote Topics

Behavior Effectively Focus Interactions Manage Might Parts Rather Separately System Taken Than

Quote Author

Russell L. Ackoff
February 12, 1919 - October 29, 2009

Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.

R. Buckminster Fuller

In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

Michael Behe

Women often focus more on delivery - what is the outcome going to be rather than what are the interactions people have in order to get there.

Theresa May

Misunderstanding may arise by confusing the Buddhist and scientific definitions of death. Within the scientific system you spoke quite validly of the death of the brain and the death of heart. Different parts of the body can die separately. However, in the Buddhist system, the word death is not used in that way. You'd never speak of the death of a particular part of the body, but rather of the death of an entire person. When people say that a certain person died, we don't ask, "Well, which part died?"

Dalai Lama

Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place.

Matt Chandler

I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read - from soap operas and movies and so on.

Ronald Frame

The idea that in the system, if you manage it in an optimum way, all of the constituent parts of the system also win, flourish, and benefit, is intrinsic to business and even to capitalism itself, properly understood. But people don't understand it because we're not taught to think that way.

John Mackey

The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employees to manipulate the system.

Laszlo Bock

You need to focus so much on what's in front of you rather than thinking about what might happen in the future.

Elena Anaya

Our whole evolution up to this point shows that human groups spontaneously evolve patterns of behavior, as well as patterns of training people for that behavior, which tend on balance to lead people to create rather than destroy. Humans are, on net balance, builders rather than destroyers.

Julian Simon

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.

David Eagleman

nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.

John Henry Holland

It is always easier - and usually far more effective - to focus on changing your behavior than on changing the behavior of others.

Bob Nelson

Goals are harmful unless they guide you to make specific behaviors easier to do. Don’t focus your motivation on doing Behavior X. Instead, focus on making Behavior X easier to do.

B. J. Fogg

In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.

Michael Schur

A Quote by Russell L. Ackoff

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors