“I built them what they wanted and I made a profit off of it. Now they call me a god...What fools these mortals be.”
“When I stopped to take a breath, I noticed I had wings.”
“Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press”
“An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.”
“THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word LITE on its product s packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being LITE . In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, My client did not lie. The container is indeed light in weight . The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that puffery is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: If it s not plastic or metallic, it s organic. Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word organic can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word organic comes from the word organism , meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as organic . Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don t trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying”
“Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don t do paradox very well.** (emphasis by author) [2002] p.25f”
“In business, three things are necessary: knowledge, temper, and time.”
“**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That s right - the essential insight doesn t come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23”
“Smartass Disciple: Master, you keep preaching the truth. They don t listen. Master of Stupidity: Oh that s not bad. That attitude keeps us in the business.”
“Be the kind of person who catches the shit before it hits the fan, not the one who scrapes it off afterwards.”
“You will be as good as others see you as good. Others will be as good as you see them as good.”
“A true generous heart can never revolve majorly with monetary skills nor business acumen nor cunning mind.”
“followers have a very clear picture of what they want and need from the most influential leaders in their lives: trust, compassion, stability, and hope”
“There’s not a chance we’ll reach our full potential until we stop blaming each other and start practicing personal accountability.”
“Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil---the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.”
“Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs— we entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
“My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.”