Russell L. Ackoff Quotes

14 quotes in 276 categories

• Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative…
• To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.
• The objective of education is learning, not teaching
• Every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems…. I choose to call such…
• Creativity is the ability to identify self-imposed constraints, remove them, and explore the consequences of their removal.
• A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that…
• It is far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right.
• Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we…
• Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that…
• Most corporate mission statements are worthless. They consist largely of pious platitudes such as: "We will hold ourselves to the highest standards of professionalism and…
• Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not…
• Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who…
• So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell.
• Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.

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