Word: adaptive
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are born. They live their brief life. The fittest of them survive long enough to produce offspring. Over time their descendants evolve, adapting to changes in their environment. Or they fail to adapt and become extinct. They behave, in short, just like living things -- except that they are not flesh and blood but programs that inhabit the memory of a computer...
...firms that are truly transnational. The successful firm will be one that is very fast on its feet, capable of short production runs, short product life cycles, very creative, very flexible. That will drive them to have a work force that is equally flexible and responsive and that can adapt to rapidly and even radically changing economic demands...
...cannot decommunize a whole society overnight," says Friedrich Magirius, superintendent of Leipzig's Protestant churches, who notes that East Germany was "a typical dictatorship in which anybody who wanted to achieve something, to climb professionally, had to adapt." Hans Meyer, a law professor at the University of Frankfurt, argues that in East Germany the line between victim and criminal was perilously thin. "Very often," he says, "a person will have resisted in one respect but helped the regime in another...
...hopes one day to join them there. "If it comes down to my family or that bird," says Haire, "that bird's going to suffer. Where would we be right now if everything that lived on this earth still survived -- the saber-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth? Things adapt or they become extinct." That applies to his industry as well, says Haire. "If we don't adapt, we'll become extinct...
...fundamental question is not: Will Harvard continue to drift away from its academic mission, narrow-minded in its pursuit of dollars and closed to outside influence, until it loses its national preeminence? Or will it accept its responsibility as an educational institution, open its decision-making structures, and adapt for the future? The answer will largely depend on who is the next president...