Executives believe these massive efforts are required to overcome their organization’s unwillingness to change. Instead, they should dig more deeply into how their own decision-making process may be causing the problem.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

The rise of planning departments and plans tends to circumscribe the discretion of the man on the firing line. Thus, it usually is true that with more extensive planning a large group of employees have less freedom in the exercise of their own judgment. Conformity, rather than originality, is expected of them. This restriction on initiative tends to snuf out the creative spark that is so essential in a successful enterprise, and it also has a bad effect on morale.

— William H. Newman, Administrative Action

…forcing programmers to work in isolation is like trying to study the swimming behavior of frogs by cutting off their legs and putting those legs in the water to watch them swim.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Our whole civilization now depends, for its day-to-day existence, on software. If the software systems of the world were to suddenly shut down, I expect that the death toll in the weeks thereafter would dwarf that of any previous time in history.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers