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" Irony and sarcasm, pointed jabbing criticism, personal mockery, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all of these various kinds of disrespect from the culture. Replace them with a clearly felt sense that people at all levels are to be honored for the struggle they’ve been willing to take on. "
― Tom DeMarco , Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
30
" WE GREW UP in an age where stasis was a possibility and a desired state. Change was something you went through to reach a new and better stasis. We may have found such change temporarily unsettling or even unpleasant, but we knew that eventually it would be over and done with. We knew we could soon settle back to enjoy a longish period of reaping the benefits of the change. During that period, disruptive change would only be a memory. Well, those times are over. The difference between the early nineties and today is the difference between Lenin’s concept of revolution (destroy the old state and replace it with a new and better one) and Trotsky’s concept of continuing revolution (destroy the old state and also destroy each successive state that replaces it). In our new economy, stasis is nothing more than an object of nostalgia. We might look back at it fondly, as we look back at the pre-nuclear age, but we can never go there again. In times of stasis, risk is an unwelcome visitor. But today risk is a constant. Nobody is ever going to succeed again without constantly taking on risks. And yet, surprisingly, risk avoidance is everywhere. "
― Tom DeMarco , Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
34
" Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization’s culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change. We talk a lot about changing corporate culture, as though it were just another parameter of the organization, like an SIC code or address. But Drucker would have us look at culture entirely differently, as the bedrock upon which any constructive change will have to rest. If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self. "
― Tom DeMarco , Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
