Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Not the right thing to do
“Steering a company toward a crisis as a method of changing culture is like putting a gun to your head to solve a headache. It’s just not the right thing to do.” —Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Crisis
“A crisis is an incident on steroids. If not handled properly and if approached in the same fashion you would approach smaller incidents, a crisis will drive your customers away and tear your organization and company apart. Crisis situations, if handled properly, including ensuring that you learn from them and that they never happen again,…
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C S Lewis: Post of Satan
‘…because a man is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) his fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when he who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a…
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Benjamin Spock: Man
“Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of…
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C S Lewis: Likeable something
‘The people never admire a man for doing something he likes: the very words “But he likes it” imply the corollary “And therefore it has no merit”.’ —C S Lewis.
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A M Tybout and B Sternthal: Brand positioning
“Brand positioning plays a key role in the building and managing of a strong brand by specifying how the brand is related to consumers’ goals. It can be thought of as answering three questions: (1) Who should be targeted for brand use? (2) What goal does the brand allow the target to achieve? and (3)…
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Anthony Bourdain: Mise-en-place
“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks… The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed.”—Anthony…
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Joseph Addison: Spectator of mankind
“I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.” —Joseph Addison.
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C S Lewis: Trial and error
“What is learned by trial and error must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came after millenniums of pot-making. The whole…
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Sun Tzu: No instance
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”—Sun Tzu.
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Annie Dillard: Spend the afternoon
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” —Annie Dillard.
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Sam Zell: Failure doesn’t exist
“Remember, for an entrepreneur, the word failure doesn’t exist. It just didn’t work out. And you get up off the floor and try again.” —Sam Zell.
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Sun Tzu: After victory
“In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.” — Sun Tzu.
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Richard Nixon: Purpose
“If you don’t have [nice things], they can mean a great deal to you. When you do have them, they mean nothing. To me, the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places, the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach. Going to…
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Freeman Dyson: Continuing exploration of mysteries
“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” — Freeman Dyson.
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C F Braun: Gregarious animal
“Man is a gregarious animal. We work in herds, in teams. The bear can do exactly as he pleases, for he works alone. We do not work alone. We depend throughout our lives on the goodwill of other men. If a man does not learn to bend, to be friendly and considerate, and to respect…
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C S Lewis: Complex good out of simple evil
“Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those by whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an…
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C S Lewis: Moments of sanity
‘We must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers”. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Enemy of scalability
“Recurring incidents are the enemy of scalability. Each time we allow an incident with the same root cause to recur in our production environments, we steal time away from our teams that would be better used developing systems and features that maximize shareholder value. This theft of engineering time runs counter to our scalability goals…
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C S Lewis: Strange illusion
“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a…
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Karl Kraus: Terrible vision
“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.” —Karl Kraus.
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Sun Tzu: Protracted campaign
“Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”—Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Process issues
“…the reality is that processes can cause issues themselves. Similar to how a poorly designed monitoring system can cause downtime on the production site due to load issues, processes can, when the complexity and level of rigor are not carefully considered, cause issues within the organization. These challenges are generally not the fault of the…
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C S Lewis: Habitual vices
‘We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth…
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Seth Klarman: Governed by behavioral science
“Do not trust financial market risk models. Despite the predilection of some analysts to model the financial markets using sophisticated mathematics, the markets are governed by behavioral science, not physical science.” —Seth Klarman.
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Ellen Ullman: Programming
“Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.” – Ellen Ullman.
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Tim Calkins: Brand
“A brand is a set of associations linked to a name, mark, or symbol associated with a product or service. The difference between a name and a brand is that a name doesn’t have associations; it is simply a name. A name becomes a brand when people link it to other things. A brand is…
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Mary Wollstonecraft: Woman’s sceptre
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” —Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Process complexity
“Choosing the right level of process complexity is not a matter of determining it forever, but rather choosing the right level of complexity for today. Tomorrow, this might need to be reevaluated. To restate the problem statement, you need to determine the right amount of process complexity for your organization at this time.” —Michael T…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Organizational change
“All organizations are comprised of different people, with different backgrounds, different experiences, different relationships with each other, and different environments. Therefore, all organizations are different. Even if you left your old job for a terrific new position and brought all your old buddies with you, you won’t be able to transport your previous company’s culture.…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Limited as an individual
“…people are the most important aspect to building and sustaining a scalable system. Do not think that you can hire great people and forget about everything else. Undervalue process at the peril of your team, your system, and yourself. Great people can only accomplish a limited amount as an individual; they need to be part…
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C S Lewis: Happiness on any terms
“It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.” —C S Lewis.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why we are here
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” —-Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Traherne: Reconciliation
“Love can forbear, and Love can forgive . . . but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object. . . . He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.” —Traherne.
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Sun Tzu: Tactical maneuvering
“After that, comes tactical maneuvering, than which there is nothing more difficult. The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.”—Sun Tzu.
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Edward R Murrow: Naked truths
“Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.” —-Edward R. Murrow.
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David Abrams: Home run
“We believe in diversification for risk reducing, but we don’t want to diversify ourselves into ignorance. If we can do three smart things in a year and nothing dumb, we will be very successful. If we can do five, that’s a home run.” —David Abrams.
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C S Lewis: Life itself
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” —C S Lewis.
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Robert Penn Warren: Historical geography
“History is all explained by geography.” —Robert Penn Warren.
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Sun Tzu: Command from the sovereign
“In war, the general receives his command from the sovereign.”—Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Seeding, feeding and weeding
‘People and organization management is broken into “seeding, feeding, and weeding.” Seeding is the hiring of people into an organization with the goal of getting better and better people. Most managers spend too little time on the interview process and don’t aim high enough. Cultural and behavioral interviewing should be included when looking to seed…
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C S Lewis: When human beings fight
“The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.” —C S Lewis.
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Kurt Vonnegut: Make your soul grow
“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” —Kurt Vonnegut.
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C S Lewis: Freedom to choose
“Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self-consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) again demands the presence to the self of something other…
