Harlan Cleveland famous quotes

If you try too carefully to plan your life, the danger is that you will succeed-succeed in narrowing your options, closing off avenues of adventure that cannot now be imagined.
-- Harlan Cleveland

#Adventure #Trying #Succeed

Leaders are problem solvers by talent and temperament, and by choice. For them, the new information environment-undermining old means of control, opening up old closets of secrecy, reducing the relevance of ownership, early arrival, and location-should seem less a litany of problems than an agenda for action. Reaching for a way to describe the entrepreneurial energy of his fabled editor Harold Ross, James Thurber said" 'He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.' That's the appropriate posture for a knowledge executive.
-- Harlan Cleveland

#Mean #Opening Up #Editors

Leaders are problem solvers by talent and temperament, and by choice.
-- Harlan Cleveland

#Inspirational #Choices #Leader

For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us.
-- Harlan Cleveland

#Real #Learning #Simple

Those with visible responsibility for leadership are nearly always too visible to take responsibility for change.
-- Harlan Cleveland

#Responsibility #Taking Responsibility #Visible

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events, having adventures and covering the activities of world leaders, appealed to me greatly. It was a very glamorous life in those days.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.

A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.

Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.

Right now I'm doing four shows at a time, trying to read four outlines every week, four scripts every week, and watching four rough cuts; it's a lot of good work. It's fun to do it, but it does wear you out.

Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.