Business Complexity Quotes & Sayings

Our world isn't about ideology anymore. It's about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions - just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are. — Matt Taibbi

Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favor of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth. — Helena Rubinstein

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. — Alain De Botton

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity
which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves
we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims. — James Baldwin

Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity. — Ben Huh

In business, complexity both drives innovation and hinders it. — Pearl Zhu

We give people political labels, sexual labels, and religious labels. But in the process, we strip them of their individuality and complexity. Prejudice is pre-judging. It's assuming that bad stories end badly, but Jesus is in the business of turning bad beginnings into happily ever afters.
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God cannot give up on you. It's not in His nature. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. All you have to do is turn around. All you have to do is crash the party! — Mark Batterson

The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives struggling with the growing complexity of IT. — Jim Whitehurst

The trend toward the ownership of land by fewer and fewer individuals is, it seems to me, a disastrous thing. For when too large a proportion of the populace is supporting itself by the indirections of trade and business and commerce and art and the million schemes of men in cities, then the complexity of society is likely to become so great as to destroy its equilibrium, and it will always be out of balance in some way. But if a considerable portion of the people are occupied wholly or partially in labors that directly supply them with many things that they want, or think they want, whether it be a sweet pea or a sour pickle, then the public poise will be a good deal harder to upset. — E.B. White

Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity- or at the very least a place that does not make it more difficult to achieve personal growth. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood. — Warren Bennis

Alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves ... mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business ... trillions apart ... yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages ... before any eyes could see ... year after year ... thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? ... on a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest ... tortured by energy ... wasted prodigiously by the sun ... poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves ... and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity ... living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein ... dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto the dry land ... here it is standing ... atoms with consciousness ... matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea ... wonders at wondering ... I ... a universe — Richard Feynman

Given the complexity in strategy, governance and relationships involved in family business, one might marvel that a family ever emerges on the other side and wants to find a permanent way to continue together. But many families that have successfully accumulated significant wealth begin to search for a means to preserve it for present and future generations. One way to do so is to form a family office. Although definitions differ, a family office is generally organized to manage and leverage the family's collective wealth, with an emphasis on stewardship rather than growth. Stewardship implies a long-term view and looks at inherited wealth as something to be treasured and preserved, in real terms, for future generations of family. A sense of stewardship is a powerful motivator, in the first place, not to destroy the financial and philosophical legacy of the founder and, second and ideally, to extend the reach of these resources into the modern day. We are going to talk extensively — Joachim Schwass

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren't bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused - everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. — Michael Crichton

Since 1870 a commander has seldom if ever been able to survey a whole battlefield from a single spot; and in any case he has had little opportunity - although sometimes a considerable inclination - to try. For the modern commander is much more akin to the managing director of a large conglomerate enterprise than ever he is to the warrior chief of old. He has become the head of a complex military organization, whose many branches he must oversee and on whose cooperation, assistance, and support he depends for his success. As the size and complexity of military forces have increased, the business of war has developed an organizational dimension that can make a mighty contribution to triumph - or to tragedy. Hitherto, the role of this organizational dimension of war in explaining military performance has been strangely neglected. We shall return to it later - indeed, it will form one of the major themes of this book. For now we simply need to note its looming presence. — Eliot A. Cohen

If you want to get a meaningful result: create something very complex, and then simplify it. — Gerry Geek

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable. — Peter Drucker

Every leader is different. Every bench is different. Every business is different. So while the complexities change, the work of coaching stays the same keep your clients at the center of the work, push them to use their strengths more and to temper their weaknesses, and illuminate blind spots because these are what really get in the way. — Stacy Feiner

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it. — P. J. O'Rourke

Business executives do not understand true IT needs and are inspired by external vendors and other sources. The business dictates a solution, IT accepts it, and then IT resources are consumed by the complexity of a non-optimal solution. There is pressure to deliver and consequently a high failure rate, rework rate, and, hence, low confidence in IT. This leads to further breakdown in IT business relationships and fuels more misaligned initiatives from an IT perspective. — Ashu Bhatia

Put succinctly, IaaS provides the tools to "build" your systems from the ground up. PaaS allows you to "deploy" your applications, without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. SaaS allows you to "buy" your applications - you do not even need to deploy or manage them at all. This is a steady progression of decreasing control and complexity, while increasing direct business value — John Belamaric

To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway. — Andrew Leigh

Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not 'helping companies to grow' but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What — John Kay

Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, "Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting." — Yvon Chouinard

Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields - from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That — Atul Gawande

Find a bigger enemy than just a rival brand. It can be bad design. It can be time. It can be pollution. It can be ugliness. It can be bad service. It can be landfill. It can be complexity. But pick your enemy well. It will drive you forward. — David Hieatt

Increasingly, the winners in today's business environment are those companies that know how to leverage complexity and exploit it to create competitive advantage. — Yves Morieux

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler