Wisdom by Katz
9 pieces of wisdom
“Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
“Where are the calculations that go with the calculated risk?”
“Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead of stating problems, people like to pass out half- accurate statements together with half-available solutions which they can't finish and which they want you to finish.”
“Every organization is self-perpetuating. Don't ever ask an outfit to justify itself, or you'll be covered with facts, figures, and fancy. The criterion should rather be, 'What will happen if the outfit stops doing what it's doing?' The value of an organization is more easily determined this way.”
“Try to find out who's doing the work, not who's writing about it, controlling it, or summarizing it.”
“Watch out for formal briefings; they often produce an avalanche (a high-level snow job of massive and overwhelming proportions).”
“The difficulty of the coordination task often blinds one to the fact that a fully coordinated piece of paper is not supposed to be either the major or the final product of the organization, but it often turns out that way.”
“Most organizations can't hold more than one idea at a time. Thus complementary ideas are always regarded as competitive. Further, like a quantized pendulum, an organization can jump from one extreme to the other, without ever going through the middle.”
“Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is it something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of 'contractor grammar', defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.”