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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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Plutarch: Difficult
“To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.” —Plutarch.
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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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Montaigne II: Rational soul
“To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.” —Montaigne II.
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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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William Shakespeare: Action is eloquence
“Action is eloquence.” —-William Shakespeare.
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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…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Management and leadership
“If leadership is a promise, management is action. If leadership is a destination, management is the directions. If leadership is inspiration, management is motivation. If leadership is a painting, management is the brush. Leadership is the pulling activities and management the pushing activities. Both are necessary to be successful in maximizing shareholder wealth.” —Michael T…
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Sun Tzu: Military method
“In respect of the military method, we have, firstly, Measurement; secondly, Estimation of quantity; thirdly, Calculation; fourthly Balancing of chances; fifthly, Victory.” —Sun Tzu.
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C S Lewis: Self-consciousness
‘There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a “self”, can exist except in contrast with an “other”, a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out.’…
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Immanuel Kant: Law for the whole world
“So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.” —Immanuel Kant.
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Sun Tzu: By example, not force
“A leader leads by example not by force.”—Sun Tzu.
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C S Lewis: Miracle of love
“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.” —C.S. Lewis.
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Melinda Varian: Working on something else
“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.” —Melinda Varian.
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Dinah Maria Mulock Craig: Blow the rest away
“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath…
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C A R Hoare: Constructing a design
“There are two ways of constructing a [design]: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”—C.A.R. Hoare.
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C S Lewis: Iniquity
“Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.” —C.S. Lewis.
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C S Lewis: Why some do not
“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.” ― C. S. Lewis.
