“… We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies, when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors …”
Information Development – Bottom-Up Business Intelligence
“We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies,” Johnson explained, “when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior.”
“Most discussions of decision making,” Peter Drucker once said, “assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.”
“Decisions,” Drucker explained, “are made at every level of the organization, beginning with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors. These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization. Knowledge workers are supposed to know more about their areas of specialization—for example, tax accounting—than anybody else, so their decisions are likely to have an impact throughout the company. Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level. It needs to be taught explicitly to everyone in organizations that are based on knowledge.”