Russell L. Ackoff Quotes

#1. Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.

Russell L. Ackoff

#2. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.

Russell L. Ackoff

#3. So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell.

Russell L. Ackoff

#4. The future is better dealt with using assumptions than forecasts.

Russell L. Ackoff

#5. The objective of education is learning, not teaching

Russell L. Ackoff

#6. Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don't know what they are talking about.

Russell L. Ackoff

#7. Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure.

Russell L. Ackoff

#8. The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things.

Russell L. Ackoff

#9. Most managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload.

Russell L. Ackoff

#10. Creativity is the ability to identify self-imposed constraints, remove them, and explore the consequences of their removal.

Russell L. Ackoff

#11. Our ability to solve problem is limited by our conception of what is feasible.

Russell L. Ackoff

#12. Nothing is harder to topple than a fact that supports a deeply held prejudice denied by its holder.

Russell L. Ackoff

#13. Every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems ... . I choose to call such a system a mess.

Russell L. Ackoff

#14. In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

Russell L. Ackoff

#15. We can only learn from mistakes, by identifying them, determining their source, and correcting them ... people learn more from their own mistakes than from the successes of others.

Russell L. Ackoff

#16. It is the satisfaction we derive from 'going there' in contrast to the satisfaction derived from 'getting there.' Recreation provides 'the pause that refreshes.' It recreates creators.

Russell L. Ackoff

#17. To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

Russell L. Ackoff

#18. Omnicompetence,' the ability to obtain whatever one wants or needs, is an unattainable but continuously approachable ideal for all mankind - past, present, and future.

Russell L. Ackoff

#19. Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.

Russell L. Ackoff

#20. It is far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right.

Russell L. Ackoff

#21. A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution.

Russell L. Ackoff

#22. Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.

Russell L. Ackoff