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(1908). The complete works of George Eliot....
"Perhaps here lay the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of; he had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong, determined soul can learn it—by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward suffering." (p. 309)
(1976). Computer Power and Human Reason.
(1977). Computer Data Structures.
(1978). Conceptual blockbusting : a pleasurable guide to better problem solving.
"Most people are not happy with criticism and, to make matters worse, are somewhat unsure of the quality of their own ideas. They therefore require a supportive environment in which to work."
(1978). Control your depression.
"Psychological prevention is a much neglected area. There is so much need for giving services to people who are hurting that we do not take the time to prepare those who are not hurting to live life in effective ways. If we did, we might be able to prevent many from becoming casualties. The savings in therapy time and money—not to mention human suffering—could be enormous. Perhaps some day 'psychological impact statements' will be as familiar to our ears as 'environmental impact statements.'"
(1981). Concepts in Discrete Mathematics.
(1982). The Computer Establishment.
"Computing is a technology with many paths to follow; at each fork there is vigorous dissension among the brightest practitioners. We need to preserve that dissension, to offer scientists and businessmen a reasonable chance to pursue whatever goal seems promising and customers the greatest possible opportunity to choose their supplier." (p. 408)
(1984). Common LISP: The Language.
(1985). The Culture of Technology.
Harry Braverman draws an instructive comparison with the first industrial revolution. That was not primarily a technical revolution; there was no change in the nature of many processes, which were merely reorganized on the basis of the division of labour. Craft production was dismembered and subdivided so that it was no longer 'the province of any individual worker'. In the modem 'revolution' the whole system is transformed. New materials, techniques and machines are used in an effort 'to dissolve the labour process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management'. The individual workman or operative is analysed almost as a piece of machinery; he or she is seen as a 'sensory device', linked to a 'computing mechanism' and 'mechanical linkages'. This, says Braverman, is what modern industry 'makes of humanity'; labour is 'used as an interchangeable part' and progress is seen as a matter of indefinitely increasing the number of tasks that can be carried out by machine. The final triumph is achieved when all the human components have been exchanged for mechanical or electronic ones." (p. 110)
(1986). Communication and Community: implications of Martin Buber's Dialogue.
"Shunning has been used for centuries as a paradoxical technique of collectively disciplining a person to bring him or her back into the group. This method may be the lesser of evils, however. As one my friends keenly observed, shunning is better than death, which has been used in some groups to eliminate the deviant. Given these two bleak choices, most of us would probably choose being ignored, But we should not minimize the pain one can feel from such exclusion. As William james stated, there is no more fiendish behavior than to act as if 'another did not exist.'"
(1986). Creativity in business.
"People who don't understand where creatively successful individuals get their confidence and risk-taking ability don't know what you know about the devastating VOJ (Voice of Judgement). Judgement creates fear and destroys confidence. Judgement shows any alternative to be fraught with risk. Judgement says no to experimentation, discovery, trail-blazing. Judgement says 'Stay right here and like it.'" (p. 56)
(1986). Cult of Information.
"The result [in Vonnegut's book Player Piano1] is a technocratic despotism wholly controlled by information technicians and corporate managers. The book raises the issue whether technology should be allowed to do all that it can do, especially when its powers extend to the crafts and skills which give purpose to people's lives. The machines are slaves, Vonnegut's rebellious engineer-hero insists. True, they make life easier in many ways; but they also compete with people. And 'anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.' As Vonnegut observes, 'Norbert Weiner, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties.'" (p. 11)
- 1. (1952). Player Piano.
(1987). Classics of Public Administration.
"The philosophy of management by directive and control—regardless of whether it is hard or soft—is inadequate to motivate because the human needs on which this approach relies are today unimportant motivators of behavior. Direction and control are essentially useless in motivating people whose important needs are social and egoistic. Both the hard and the soft approach fail today because they are simply irrelevant to the situation." (p. 260)
(1988). Changing Ways: A Practical Tool for Implementing Change Within Organizations.
"A basic axiom of any change effort is that 'the further away the people defining the change are from the people who have to live with the change, then the more likelihood that the change will develop problems.'" (p. 59)
(1988). The Constraints of Corporate Tradition: Doing the Correct Thing Not Just What the Past Dictates.
But when boosting productivity comes to mean in practice nothing more than an efficiency-driven effort to cut costs and do better with line workers what is now being done, we can watch the coral build up before our very eyes. In an earlier environment, the link between old-fashioned, direct labor-based productivity and competitive strength was obvious and immediate. Today, that linkage is more complicated and less certain. Doing the right things is every bit as important as doing things right. Time was, we could think of direct-labor productivity as a pretty fair approximation of competitiveness and be confident we were on the mark. No longer. The proxy does not hold. Forgetful that it was—and is—but a proxy that holds for some circumstances but not all, many of today's managers treat as a living fact what is no more than the hard shell of past experience.
So it is with most of the maps by which managers steer. What was once known to be an artifice, though no less useful for that, gradually loses its air of being an imaginatively constructed thing and, equally gradually, takes on the air of being something real and hard and concrete in its own right." (p. 13)
So it is with most of the maps by which managers steer. What was once known to be an artifice, though no less useful for that, gradually loses its air of being an imaginatively constructed thing and, equally gradually, takes on the air of being something real and hard and concrete in its own right." (p. 13)
(1989). Catch-22.
(1989). Creative Organization Theory.
"As we all know, bureaucracies are supposed to operate 'by the rules.' They are places where individual initiative, enterprise, and creativity are supposed to take second place—if they are permitted at all!—to the policies and procedures that have been defined or authorized by those in charge of the organization as a whole.
Weber observed that the bureaucratic approach to organization mechanized the process of administration, exactly as machines had routinized production in industry. And his writings make frequent reference to how this process of mechanization squeezes out the human dimension." (p. 49)
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