People From Illinois

"The incorporation of subsidiary competencies along with major missions is commonplace in organizations of all types and is not a major discovery. But our proposition is not an announcement of the fact; rather it attempts to indicate the in which domains are expanding"

"The more sectors in which the organization subject to rationality norms is constrained; the more power the organization will seek over remaining sectors of its task environment... many constraints and unable to achieve power in other sectors of its task environment will seek to enlarge the task environment."

"Organizations in Action (1964) [was] a masterpiece on the behavior of organizations, incorporating an open-systems perspective to explain the influence of technology on the matter in which work systems are structured for task accomplishment."

"Thompson’s Organizations in Action was published more than three decades ago but is still one of the classics of organization theory. The book provides a unifying perspective on open- and closed-systems thinking in organization theory that has been recognized as an important contribution in its own right (Scott 1998). The environment is a key source of uncertainty for an organization, and Thompson argued that much of organizational action can be explained by the need to reduce uncertainty. Consider a specific action such as “buffering” (e.g., building warehouses or storages), aiming to seal off the organization’s technical or operational core from environmental uncertainty. The main lines of his arguments always are couched in explicitly formulated propositions but also are brought to life by examples such as the typologies of technologies (long-linked, mediating, or intensive), interdependencies (pooled, sequential, or reciprocal), and coordination (by standardization, by plan, or by mutual adjustment). His typologies have inspired much research in organizational design (Galbraith 1977) and contingency theory (Mintzberg 1979)."

"Marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain beneficial exchanges with target buyers for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives."

"First, he has done more than any other writer or scholar to promote the importance of marketing, transforming it from a peripheral activity, bolted on to the more "important" work of production. Second, he continued a trend started by Peter Drucker, shifting emphasis away from price and distribution to a greater focus on meeting customers' needs and on the benefits received from a product or service. Third, he has broadened the concept of marketing from mere selling to a more general process of communication and exchange, and has shown how marketing can be extended and applied to charities, political parties and many other non-commercial situations."

"Companies pay too much attention to the cost of doing something. They should worry more about the cost of not doing it."

"The good news is that marketing takes a day to learn. The bad news is that it takes a lifetime to master!"

"Good mission statements focus on a limited number of goals, stress the company’s major policies and values, and define the company’s major competitive scopes. These include:"

"Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customers become better of."

"Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make! It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers, and benefits for the stakeholders. Market innovation is gained by creating customer satisfaction through product innovation, product quality, and customer service. It these are absent, no amount of advertising, sales promotion, or salesmanship can compensate."

"No company in its right mind tries to sell to everyone. Gillette does not try to sell razor blades to preteens, and Kimberly-Clark doesn't try to sell its Huggies to childless families. A savvy steel company doesn't try to sell steel to every steel-using company."

"Is marketing management an art or a science? Some marketing observers maintain that good marketing is more of an art and does not lend itself to rigorous analysis and deliberation. Others strongly disagree and contend that marketing management is a highly disciplined enterprise that has much in common with other business disciplines."

"The organization's marketing task is to determine the needs, wants and interests of target markets and to achieve the desired results more effectively and efficiently than competitors, in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer's or society's well-being."

"Good companies will meet needs; great companies will create markets."

"The art of marketing is largely the art of brand building. When something is not a brand, it will be probably be viewed as a commodity."

"The sales department isn't the whole company, but the whole company had better be the sales department."

"By integration we mean the process of achieving unity of effort among the various subsystems in the accomplishment of the organization's tasks."

"Paul R. Lawrence [was] a renowned sociologist and a pivotal figure in the intellectual history of who was one of the world's most influential and prolific scholars in the field of organizational behavior."

"Humans will probably always need the help of especially gifted moral leaders in order to extend the bonds of caring and trust beyond the easy range of the family and the face-to-face community. Such bonds have become essential to the future of humanity."

"Globalization need not work this way. Its benefits can be steered to all nations and to all levels in each nation in a more equitable manner. But a free-market, laissez-faire process will not do this automatically. It will require governmental regulatory action with guidelines and incentives that can best be established at the world level."

"The positive and negative consequences of the various kinds of globalization and of economic growth versus economic stagnation are consistent with the Renewed Darwinism Theory's proposition that one's sense of dA fulfillment is relative to that of other people to whom one compares oneself. The innate insatiable drive to acquire cannot be fulfilled, even by a steady increase in wealth, if one is steadily falling behind others. This may be illogical—a Porsche is a Porsche, no matter what's parked in the driveway next door—but it is the way our minds have evolved to work."

"To deal with the much-discussed but still poorly understood complex of economic affairs known as globalization, we must examine its several forms from a Renewed Darwinian Theory point of view. Some can have positive effects for all parties while others inherently benefit the rich and strong at the expense of the poor and weak. Furthermore, some can be beneficial but also lend themselves to abuse, especially by people without a conscience, and therefore call for some kind of world-level impulse/check/balance control."

"Other things being equal, differentiation and integration are essentially antagonistic, and that one can be obtained only at the expense of the other."

"Sales personnel in all six organizations indicated a primary concern with customer problems, competitive activities, and other events in the marketplace. Manufacturing personnel were all primarily interested in problems of cost reduction, process efficiency, and similar matters."

"The quality of the state of collaboration that exist among organizations that is required to achieve unity of effort by the demands of the environment."

"By differentiation we mean the differences in cognitive and emotional orientation among managers in different units and the differences in formal structure among units."

"The act of segmenting the organization into departments would influence the behavior of organizational members in several ways. The members of each unit would become specialists in dealing with the particular tasks. Both because of their prior education and experience and because of the nature of their task, they would develop specialized working styles and mental processes."

"Orientation of members toward others [is] a cognitive and affective orientation toward the objects of work, which is manifested in a person's interpersonal style."

"[Integration is defined as] the process of achieving unity of effort among the various subsystems in the accomplishment of the organization's task."

"The state of segmentation of the organizational system into subsystems, each of which tends to develop particular attributes in relation to the requirements posed by its relevant external environment. Differentiation, as used here, includes the behavioral attributes of members of organizational subsystems."

"March and Simon's work reflects a key concern with the issue of inducing contributions from organizational members and emphasizes rationality in organizations. The writing of Likert and McGregor reflects a central interest in organizational arrangements for releasing the underutilized energy of individual members. Argyris' work emphasizes the impact of the organization on individual development. All of these writers tend to start with the individual as the basic unit of analysis and build toward the large organization, while we are proposing to start with larger, sociological entities- the entire organization and its larger subsystems."

"CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research."

"This is a comparative study of six organizations operating in the same industrial environment. The subsystems (sales, research, and production) in each organization were differentiated from each other in terms of subsystem formal structures, the member's goal orientation, member's time orientations and member's interpersonal orientations. This differentiation was related to the requirements of the particular subenvironment with which each subsystem dealt. A relationship was found between the extent to which the states of differentiation and integration in each organization met the requirements of the environment and the relative economic performance of the organizations."

"Humans have evolved a leadership brain. Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives."

"We humans are truly marvelous, adaptable creatures, products of an exciting and inspiring — even though often dangerous — evolutionary story, a story to be celebrated with conviction and enthusiasm even as we move on to new challenges."

"With Donald Trump as the presumptive presidential nominee, we are witnessing a populist hijacking of one of the United States' great political parties... [R]ooted in ignorance, prejudice, fear and isolationism... This troubles me deeply as a Republican, but it troubles me even more as an American."

"I mean, we're tough but we don't kill our opponents and eat them."

"We're kind of a geeky tech family. When I married Ronda's dad, instead of an engagement ring he got me an engagement Macintosh."

"Enough is enough... It's time to put country before party and say it together: Never Trump."

"It's one thing to remember history and to put up historical markers that get it right. It's quite another thing to commemorate someone and to name stuff for him. You don't learn anything from driving the Jefferson Davis Highway about Jefferson Davis except that he was a great man and should be honored. And it's precisely that last little bit - should be honored - that we need to take away from him."

"White Democrats opposed Reconstruction not because it was a failure, but because it was working. Today almost all historians of Reconstruction hold that view."

"In the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party was the party of overt white supremacy and even called itself 'The White Man's Party' into the 1920s."

"Between 1890 and about 1970, northerners found it less embarrassing to let Dixie tell the story of the cause it lost than to reminisce about the cause they had abandoned. The Civil War had been about something other than states' rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States. As it ground on it became a struggle to end slavery. At Gettysburg in the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln was already proclaiming 'a new birth of freedom', black freedom. Conversely, on their way to and from Gettysburg, Lee's troops seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery. This was in keeping with Confederate national policy, which virtually re-enslaved free people of color into work gangs on earthworks throughout the south."

"Americans, 150 years after the Civil War began, are still getting it wrong."

"In the twentieth century no one's hands were clean. Korean troops committed more atrocities per capita than Americans, in Vietnam. Vietnam of course attacked Cambodia. Japan attacked almost everyone. And so on."

"Some Confederate soldiers switched sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army disappeared through desertion. Eighteen thousand slaves joined Sherman, so many that the army had to turn some away. Compare these facts with the portrait common in our textbooks of Sherman's marauders looting their way through a united south. The increasing ideological confusion in the Confederate states, coupled with the increasing strength of the United States, helps explains the Union victory... Many nations and people have continued to fight with far inferior means and weapons... The Confederacy's ideological contradictions were its gravest liabilities, ultimately causing its defeat."

"According to Confederate ideology, blacks liked slavery; nevertheless, to avert revolts and runaways, the Confederate states passed the 'twenty nigger law', exempting from military conscription one white man as overseer for every twenty slaves. Throughout the war, Confederates withheld as much as a third of their fighting forces from the front lines and scattered them throughout areas with large slave populations to prevent slave uprisings. When the United States allowed African Americans to enlist, Confederates were forced by their ideology to assert that it would not work; blacks would hardly fight like white men. The undeniable bravery of the 54th Massachusetts and other black regiments disproved the idea of black inferiority. Then came the incongruity of truly beastly behavior by southern whites towards captured black soldiers, such as the infamous Fort Pillow massacre by troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest, who crucified black prisoners on tent frames and then burned them alive, all in the name of preserving white civilization."

"Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the 'Black Republicans' who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt... White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sold them south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them."

"Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick."