Rochester Creative Research Group

"If you see your work as only a job, then it's dragging you away from what you really want to be doing. If you see it as a calling, then it is no longer a toiling sacrifice. Instead, it becomes an expression of you, a part of you." (p. 98)

"Everyone who works for Anheuser-Busch Companies, based in St. Louis, is entitled to two free cases of beer a month." (p. 214)

"Orwell came down hard in 1984 against what philosophers call mechanistic theories of knowledge, against the view that the motions of the world report to every man's senses in uniform ways." (p. 64)

"When you work in an office everything becomes an abstraction. The higher you travel up the chain, the less actual work is being done, as everyone becomes responsible for overseeing those below them, who are supervising those below them, ad nauseam. In the Vedic tradtion Hindus believe that the world's firmament rests on four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a turtle. The question always comes: 'What's holding up the turtle?' And the answer is: 'It's turtles all the way down.' Likewise in corporations--it is all turtles, straight to the bottom, and after a while it becomes impossible to feel what is happening at an experiential level. Only lunch meetings persist. Postmodern capitalism." (p. 167)

See also the second chapter titled "Turtles all the way down" in Kantrow. [1]

References

"There is the principle of potential, the idea that we are embryonic and can grow and develop and release more and more potential, develop more and more talents. Highly related to potential is the principle of growth--the process of releasing potential and developing talents, with the accompanying need for principles such as patience, nurturance, and trust." p. 34

In the introduction to the book, subtitled "Letting Go of a Hopeless Ritual", the authors include the following quotation: "The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds--with no programs."

The authors argue that appraisal ratings produce "unintended consequences--the insidious, destructive, and counterproductive effects of giving people ratings about their work performance. Whether accurate or not, people are psychologically affected by ratings. And except for people rated at the highest end of the scale, the impact is usually negative and consequently counterproductive to the cause of improving performance." (p. 69)

"Certain conditions are necessary for creativity to flourish, one of which is the time to play with ideas while in an open mode of thinking: relaxed, expansive, less purposeful, more contemplative (Cleese 1991). Organizationally, this translates into administrative slack. Peter Drucker relates a company's ability to innovate to the amount of administrative slack it provides in its daily operations ('Creativity in Danger' 1991)." (p. 149)

"We thus define action learning as follows:
'An approach to working with and developing people that uses work on an actual project or problem as the way to learn. Participants work in small groups to take action to solve their problem and learn how to learn from that action. Often a learning coach works with the group in order to help the members learn how to balance their work with the learning from that work.'" (p. 3)