Everybody's doing it! Should you?
The vaunted new management tools and strategies - reengineering, electronic commerce, incentive bonuses, and more - have proven their value over and over. Companies have had great success following the gurus' advice and achieving greater productivity and profitability, reduced costs and turnover.

One of the things that differentiates humans from other animals is our ability to make sense of the environment. Because of this distinction, our species has developed technological tools of increasing complexity -- from sticks and stones to computers and cannons.

We've just gone through another strategic planning session. We hoped that this one would be more productive than the others, but - as always happens - we just seemed to go around in circles.

There's a true story about a family of homesteaders that had "lost" their youngest child, a little girl. Everyone scoured the countryside looking for her, calmly at first, then frantically, eventually suspending their search to quarrel about who was supposed to be watching her. After searching the woods and fields all day, her aunt discovered her asleep in the grandfather clock, where she had been hiding from her brother.