Critique me, please!

There are very interesting insights in John Maeda's short book "Redesign Leadership". If you are in the process of evaluating or transforming, it can be a great inspiration: born from the selection of 1200 posts (tweets) of 140 characters each, like small haikus, the pages gather Maeda's experience and insights, who is now the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. Here are some quotes and excerpts:

“Competency results in success results in complacency results in failure results in learning how to be competent again”

“To an artist, criticism offers the opportunity to realize if others are interested in the issues at the core of their work, if the intentions at its origins and its coherence are evident. For designers, it's an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of their work, by checking if it's intuitive to others…”

“A good critique reveals one's weaknesses, but recovering from a critique can also be difficult: for this reason, approaching honest reactions with an open mind is essential…”

“Once I was at a faculty meeting where I was asked to give my opinion on learning. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I received a strong rebuke in response, something along the lines of: 'you really need to learn to distinguish between learning and knowledge.' At first, this sentence made no sense to me, but hours later I began to understand the implications of this critical lesson. I learned that the higher you are in an organization, the less likely people are to say what they think, for fear of repercussions…”

“..However, without stimuli, it's impossible to learn new things, and for this reason, I think direct criticism is the fastest way to learn how to improve. Dean Shefrin says: Criticism teaches you to listen deeply to the judgment of others, so you can listen more deeply to yourself! Being hit on the cognitive side, or being subjected to a barrage of criticism, can sometimes be a good thing”.