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Quote by Steven Magee

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Steven Magee

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“The opportunity lies in the fact that a reorg makes an organization very limber. Managers across the organization are thinking the same thing as you: “Well, if we’re going to solve problem A right now, we should take a stab at problem B since we’re going to be mucking with everything anyway.” If you’ve got an agenda, if you’ve got a change in mind, it’s time to consider pushing it because the chances that you can effect change are vastly higher in the midst of a reorg.”

“We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will…”