I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another 'great person'.
Interpretation
True greatness comes from individuality rather than imitation.
This quote emphasizes the importance of originality and authentic leadership. It suggests that both organizations and individuals achieve their true potential by embracing their unique qualities instead of mimicking others' success. Imitation may lead to temporary success, but true greatness is rooted in innovation and personal authenticity.
In practice
In a leadership workshop, to illustrate the importance of originality.
[Seeds Are Small.] Becoming a force of nature doesn't mean that all of our aspirations must be "grand." First steps are often small, and initial visions that focus energy effectively often address immediate problems. What matters is engagement in the service of a larger purpose rather than lofty aspirations that paralyze action. Indeed, it's a dangerous trap to believe that we can pursue onlhy "great visions."
All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift.
Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
In the absence of a great dream pettiness prevails. Shred visions foster risk taking, courage and innovation. Keeping the end in mind creates the confidence to make decisions even in moments of crisis.
The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.
Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?
Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
Its not a story in which the characters grow up, but a story in which they draw on something already inside them, brought out by the particular circumstances. I want my young friends to live like that, and I think they, too, have such a wish.
Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.
The hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself. One doesn't like to remember unpleasant details, but forgetting them makes one's life seem disorganized.
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