CHAPTER 2

The Players and the Parts

An ad appeared some years ago for a major software company that showed a drawing similar to the one here, claiming that this is not a cow because it is a chart of the parts of a cow. In a healthy cow the parts don’t even know that they are parts; they just work together harmoniously. The ad asked would you like your organization to work like a chart or a cow?11

This is a serious question! Cows have no trouble working like cows, nor, for that matter, do any of us working as individual human beings, physiologically at least. So why do we have so much trouble working together socially? Is it because we are so obsessed with those charts?

Thinking Outside the Boxes

We talk incessantly about “thinking outside the ...

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