Kenichi Ohmae - The Borderless World (1990)

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It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.

Kenichi Ohmae

Top managers are always slow to point the finger of responsibility at headquarters or at themselves. When global faults have local symptoms, they will be slower still. When taking corrective action means a full, zero-based review of all systems, skills and structures, their speed will decrease even further. And when their commitment to acting globally is itself far from complete, any motion is unlikely.

Kenichi Ohmae

In practice, the managerial decision to tackle organizational and systems changes is made even more difficult by the way in which problems become visible. Usually a global systems problem first comes into view in the form of local symptoms. Rarely do such problems show up where the real underlying causes are.

Kenichi Ohmae