Goodbye to school

Well, my two years of learning have come to an end. I'm on to new projects, new patterns, new pathways of life. I will miss putting up my papers (except the boring ones on case studies etc). It is likely that this blog will now become nothing but a scrapbook, however, I may still put up ideas or conversations regarding business issues now and again. I'd like to conclude my school experience with a quote from my textbook The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases by Mintzberg, Lampel, Quinn and Ghoshal.
They quote from Eva Luna in Allende, 1989 pp. 187-188)

'I began to wonder whether anything truely existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses... I was consoled by the idea that I could take the gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...a world of my own populated with living people, a world where I imposed the rules and could change them at will. In the motionless sands where my stories germinated, every birth, death, and happening depended on me. I could plant anything I wanted in those sands; I had only to speak the right word to give it life. At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.'

The modern word is 'vision', and its overtones of dreams are appropriate. Imaginations of the future are stronger and more lasting than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around us, and that power protects exploration from its enemies.

As Eva Luna reminds us, intellectual passions for reasoned intelligence and constrained imagination have never entirely extinguished a human aesthetic based on fantasy. A commitment to arbitraritly imagined worlds has elements of beauty in it... from this perspecitve, the occasional argument between those who imagine individual organizations as changing and enduring and those who imagine them as rigid and disposable is an argument not only about the truth, but also about the beauty and justice of possible fantasies of human existance, thus perhaps worth taking seriously." (pp. 470-471)