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We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

Charles Handy

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Charles Handy
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: January 1
Author
Economist
University Teacher
Writer
Things
Problems
Think
Past
Solves
Thinking
Thought
Prisoners
Problem
Prisoner
Anything
Seldom
Hard
Solve
Way
Changes
Always
Except

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You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.
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Purpose, pattern, and people, the three P's at the heart of life.
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Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.
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Competition is healthy ... but there is more to life than winning or we should nearly all be losers
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Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training
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A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison.
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We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
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A consultant solves other peoples problems. I could never do that. I want to help other people solve their own problems.
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We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.
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We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational processes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage.
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To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
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The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world-not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
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The world by and large has to be reinvented.
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The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be.
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Learning is experience understood in tranquility.
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We should see schools as safe arenas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents... for taking responsibity for tasks and others people, for learning how to learn... and for exploring our beliefs about life and society.
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Villages are small and personal, and their inhabitants have names, characters, and personalities. What more appropriate concept on which to base our institutions of the future than the ancient social unit whose flexibility and strength substained human society through millenia?
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The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.
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The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.
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I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.
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