Herbert N. Casson cited in: Forbes magazine (1950) The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life. p. 218
1950s and later
“Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.”
Abstract
"Organizations as action generators," 1983
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William H. Starbuck 8
American academic 1934Related quotes

"The Way Of Chuang Tzu".
The Way of Chuang-Tzŭ (1965)
Context: The secret of the way proposed by Chuang Tzu is … not the accumulation of virtue and merit … but wu wei, the non-doing, or non-action, which is not intent upon results and is not concerned with consciously laid plans or deliberately organized endeavors: "My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness... Perfect joy is to be without joy... if you ask 'what ought to be done' and 'what ought not to be done' on earth to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have [a fixed and predetermined] answer" to suit every case. If one is in harmony with Tao-the cosmic Tao, "Great Tao" — the answer will make itself clear when the time comes to act, for then one will act not according to the human and self-conscious mode of deliberation, but accord ing to the divine and spontaneous mode of wu wei, which is the mode of action of Tao itself, and is therefore the source of all good.
The other way, the way of conscious striving, even though it may claim to be a way of virtue, is fundamentally a way of self-aggrandizement, and it is consequently bound to come into conflict with Tao. Hence it is self-destructive, for "what is against Tao will cease to be."

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 26.
On the Importance of Culture
Source: "An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy," 1943, p. 51
Weick, Karl E. Organizational culture as a source of high reliability. National Emergency Training Center, 1987. p. 98
1980s-1990s
Robert H. Waterman (1993), Adhocracy: The Power to Change. W.W. Norton ; Book summary

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 72
Source: Social behavior: Its Elementary Forms, 1961, p. 43 (in 1974 edition)
Source: TVA and the grass roots : a study in the sociology of formal organization, 1949, pp. 256-257