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xiii There are... limits to the capacity of human intelligence to match the complexities of the problems that individuals and organizations face. So it is that, in practice, managerial decision-making ordinarily calls for simplified models that capture the main, or most urgent, features of a problem without all its complexities.
xv R. M. Cyert and J. G. March's Behavioral Theory of the Firm, published in 1963. In any organization, they argued, there can be, and usually are, quite different and virtually incompatible views about what the goals of the organization are. There are also - rather more frequently, and clearly - different ideas about how to attain those goals. What agreement there is tends to settle for 'highly ambiguous' goals. And behind any agreement reached on rather vague objectives, 'there is considerable disagreement and uncertainty about sub-goals'; in fact, 'organizations appear to be pursuing different goals at the same time'.
xvi Cyert and March... instead of a clearly defined and consistently held objective, firms are involved in a constant process of internal debate and negotiation. In practice, the goals of any organization are being constantly amended as the result of what they call a 'continuous bargaining-learning process'.
p.22 If, as Whitehead said, the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention, the task of the succeeding century has been to organize inventiveness.
p.35 Firms employing many thousands of people... Such concerns must keep alive, and in order to keep alive they must become adaptive; change must occur within the organization... if it is to occur at all.
p.49 The scheme worked in the following fashion. [JLJ - We are all schemers - every one of us. We all sit and hatch schemes and contemplate how we can advance along lines of growth and development, or how we can maintain a position in times of crisis. Our schemes take into account the potential scheming of others - the result is economic and social activity, progress, perhaps innovation.]
p.102 In our terms, leadership at the top, or 'direction', involves constant preoccupation with the technical and commercial parameters of the situation in which the concern has to operate, and with the adjustment of the internal system to that external situation.
p.114-115 [JLJ - Herbert] Simon suggests that, by common knowledge, a large number of the decisions we ordinarily make, in business and elsewhere, fall within the limits of a 'programme': 'Under certain circumstances when an individual or an organization is confronted with a situation requiring decision, the decision process goes off quickly and smoothly - almost as though no decision were being made at all, but the matter had been decided previously.' ...In programmed decisions the choice made is to some extent a foregone conclusion, although it may be necessary to perform a complicated series of calculations before a single choice is actually made. In fact, it corresponds to our conception of interpreting local and technical information in relation to a specific choice between courses of action.
p.116 As Colin Cherry has pointed out, the search for new information implies doubts.
p.116 Mary Parker Follett. 'An order or command is a step in a process, a moment in a movement of interweaving experience. We should guard against thinking this step is a larger part of the whole process than it really is. There is all that leads to the order, all that comes afterwards - methods of administration, the watching and recording of results, what flows out of it to make further orders.' [JLJ - Dynamic Administration] (pp.149-150).
p.118 The notion of 'continuous expectations' which Meredeth regards as a 'basic characteristic of living organisms' is more familiar sociologically as the perpetual call for action put upon the individual.* [W.G. Henry in his comment on Meredith's paper suggests that the external situation of the individual is constantly and inherently stressful.] Faced with these demands for action, involving decisions, the individual is constantly re-creating for himself operational representations of the situations through which he moves. 'Living is a moment-to-moment affair, and the translation of' (others' and our own) 'conduct and events into non-temporal patterns provides us with a kind of chart for the guidance of next action; at any one moment, that is, we need to be concerned simultaneously and systematically with the events, persons, and other objects we believe relevant to our own conduct at that moment.' [JLJ - we might stretch 'objects' to include symbols present in the environment, including fine details which prompt action in the form of 'I should probably do something about that'. For example, a rear brake light 'turns on' in the car in front of us, perhaps prompting us to momentarily take our foot off the gas pedal, even without thought.]
p.118 Guides for action... are... functions of interaction between persons.
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