Best Quotations

A Thousand `Moments of Truth'
"The current ferment over quality and productivity in higher education may have as much to do with the level of integrity and caring exemplified in the daily behavior of those holding learning climates in trust as with our ability to design systems of quality assurance. Thus, we must look `beyond systems' to the principles and standards manifested in the behavior of faculty and administrators who give voice and meaning to our institutions. The cause of quality may be advanced or damaged in a thousand `moments of truth' occurring in our colleges and universities every day, in the daily exchanges between faculty/administrators and students."

Civil Institutions
"Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who so wisely observed and wrote about the new American republic early in the 19th century, noted that we did not have the traditional European aristocracy to check the power of the state (or sovereign). Instead, America had a tradition of civil institutions such as churches, lodges, labor unions, chambers of commerce, business associations and political parties, all of which served to limit government which has, as its natural tendency, to grow and take power from the people."

Competence
"Irony is for sophomores and the tragic view of life is only for adolescents. How precious it is that we live at all! And work is what we do with our lives. Until the end, there is always something productive we can do. The daily test for every one of us is: Did we do what we chose to do as well as we could? Competence is the ethical content of work. The ethical person is conscientious--you do whatever you do to the best of your ability and sensitivity."


Death by Misprint
"And the people who don't have the benefit of your counsel... who are trying to do it themselves... who are planning their financial futures alone... would be wise to remember what Mark Twain said about the perils of self-diagnosis. `You should always be careful when reading books about health,' he said. `Otherwise, you might die of a misprint.'
"For the more fortunate people... your clients and policy owners... we would do well to follow the advice of a man who was less famous than Mark Twain... but no less wise.
"David Burpee used a simple philosophy to turn his family's seed business into a household name. `I always try to remember,' he said, `that people really aren't interested in my seeds. They're interested in their gardens, their tomatoes and their lawns.'
"If people were really interested in buying policies... I guarantee you that we'd be in the catalog business."
High Tech Ice Fishing
"Customers are of course king whenever the competition gets intense. And today, they're demanding, and getting, new capabilities that are allowing them to live as people have never lived before.
"You may have read newspaper reports a while ago about a Norwegian by the name of Jans Amgust.
"Jans decided to go ice fishing in an ocean inlet near Oslo. He walked out on the ice, drilled his hole, and settled down. It took him a while before he noticed that the patch of ice he was sitting on had broken away and was drifting off into the North Sea.
"But don't worry about Jans. He whipped out his cellular phone, called the nearest fire department, and the Norwegian Royal Coast Guard rescued him within 30 minutes--along with his sled.
"Advanced communications technologies are often life-savers. But, day to day, consumers are leading such complex lives that they look mainly to communications as a way to simplify. And their communications providers are scrambling to meet their expectations."

Horse Selling & Mergers
"I also pointed out that deals often look more exciting from the outside. We had a story about this back in Iowa. It seems a man found that his horse was ailing. So he took the horse to the vet and asked--`Can you help me? Sometimes my horse walks fine. But other times, he limps.' The vet looked at the horse and said, `Yes... I think I can help you. When he's walking fine... sell him.'
"That's a good thing to remember anytime. It's a good thing to remember in the merger market. The buyer must always beware.

How to Protect Your Technology
"What is the point of trying to protect existing technology? For the most part, it is a rapidly-wasting asset, a perishable commodity. As Roger Bateille, of Airbus, has said: `The only way to protect your technology is to move very, very fast.'"

Measuring the Right Things
"It is sometimes said that what gets measured is what gets managed. Unfortunately, in our industry, we have been in the habit of measuring some of the wrong things. I still hear people talk about the need for reducing overhead rates. Why? This is a ratio of direct to indirect costs. Theoretically, through increased use of automation in the building of increasingly complex structures, you could drive the overhead rate up to near-infinity, while continuing to drive down unit costs.
"In the battle for affordability, it is unit costs... and life-cycles costs... that count. And to focus on those costs we have to design and build with a three-dimensional view of the optimal total cost structure.
"There are three keys to the mint of increased productivity in manufacturing. One is better tools. Another is better processes. And the third is trained, empowered, and motivated people."


Monopoly & Grove's Law
"Price/performance doubles every 12-18 months--known as `Moore's Law' after Intel founder Gordon Moore. Today's most complex chips pack 5 to 7 million transistors on a chip the size of a thumbnail. Texas Instruments recently announced technology to pack 125 million transistors onto a single chip. Tomorrow's chips will power such applications as voice recognition, two-way TV, video on demand, etc. No end in sight!
"The second factor is the continued expansion in communications bandwidth. It is not as dramatic as advances in chip technology due to historical monopolies in telephony. In fact, a corollary to Moore's Law is `Grove's Law' dubbed by Andy Grove, Intel's CEO. `Grove's Law': While microchip price/performance doubles every 12-18 months, telecommunications bandwidth doubles every 100 years!
"But with deregulation and technology advances, that's changing. New communications technologies such as ISDN, SONET, ATM, etc., are opening up lines for true, global electronic commerce."

Obedience to the Unenforceable
"The challenge to you then is to save our culture, no small task. We can't look for government to marshall our resources or lead us as was done in the great wars. We can only restrain it from doing no more (or hopefully less) harm. The great battlefield of this next war is in our homes, schools, and our neighborhoods. This is a battle for hearts and minds and our weapons are our ideas, virtues, and values. Lord Moulton, a noted English judge spoke on what he called `the domain of obedience to the unenforceable.' While it may include moral duty, social responsibility, and proper behavior, it extends beyond them to cover `all cases of doing right where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.' This challenge, this war, is in short a spiritual battle and first we need to win the warfare with ourselves, then we can be examples for others."

Original Thinking
"Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again." --Attributed to Goethe

Property Rights
"A second protection against politicalization and the danger it poses to both the legal order and the moral order is the regime of property rights and economic liberty. This is so for two reasons. To the extent that property rights are secure and strongly guarded, a whole range of human activity is put beyond the power of politics. Thus, fundamental decisions in these areas are no longer the concern of contending factions and competing moralities. Economic and societal life is not turned into ideological warfare.
"The other important check property rights place upon politicalization is that they force individuals to exercise personal responsibility. When individuals bear the immediate consequences of their actions, for good or ill, they are overwhelmingly more considered, rational, and informed than when these actions are of a political or public sort. People are very careful about imposing their values on others when there is a personal cost to such conduct."
Redefining Distance
"Technology's power to redefine ethical distance is not confined to individuals. It also applies to corporations, countries, and cultures. We're quickly reaching the point where technology really will permit the development of virtual corporations. A company may physically be located in one country. But it will be able to carry out many of its functions in distant locations via telephone and computer screen. To quote The Economist, `Services as diverse as designing an engine, monitoring a security camera, selling insurance or running a secretarial paging service will become as easily exportable as car parts or refrigerators.' This is already happening. For example, the back office functions of Swissair and British Airways are now located in India. Heating, lighting, elevators and security operations in office buildings in Pacific Rim countries are monitored from Perth, Australia."

Responsibility & Will Power
"As responsibility is passed to your hands, it will not do, as you live the rest of your life, to assume that someone else will bear the major burdens, that someone else will demonstrate the key convictions, that someone else will run for office, that someone else will take care of the poor, that someone else will visit the sick, protect civil rights, enforce the law, preserve culture, transmit value, maintain civilization, and defend freedom.
"You must never forget that what you do not value will not be valued, that what you do not remember will not be remembered, that what you do not change will not be changed, that what you do not do will not be done. You can, if you will, craft a society whose leaders, business and political, are less obsessed with the need for money. It is not really a question of what to do but simply the will to do it. The great New York Yankee pitcher, Lefty Gomez, said this: `If you don't throw it, they can't hit it.'"

Smart Maps
"Already, you can get a GPS (Global Positioning System) in your car, and it will show you where you are on a map and plot routes. But it won't give you any information about what's going on around you. That's what's going to be different in ten years. We'll be combining GPS with the traffic management infrastructure to help manage traffic flow. So, your dashboard map will show you where traffic problems are, and it will plot the best route around them.
"We'll also be using global positioning systems to help stop crime by giving us the power to monitor the location of our cars and other valuables. And we'll be able to follow the exact location of our most precious valuable, our children, as they walk home from school, for instance."
The Global Brand
"The truth is that there are very few truly global food or beverage brands, such that the product is named the same, and tastes exactly the same, all around the world. An exhaustive study by Young & Rubicam concluded that of 6,200 brands from all over the world, only one maintained an identical product and image--and that was, if you haven't already guessed, Coca-Cola.


The Tricks to Success
"Someone once asked James Lofton, wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills, what tricks he used to achieve success and Lofton replied, `One trick is to work harder than the other guy. The second trick, always hustle. Third trick, study and know what you're doing. Fourth trick, always be prepared. Fifth, never give up. Those are my tricks.'"

Throwing Away Assets
"By the year 2000, the typical Fortune 500 company will have over 400 trillion characters of electronic data in its databases. This data represents a gold mine of information--about customer buying patterns, preferences, and interests.
"But the fact is, while most organizations are active users of information technology... they are not actively using their information assets. The average organization discards 85% of data that it collects on a daily basis.
"This is my central point today. In underutilizing information, we are literally throwing away what is perhaps our most important asset for enhancing our competitiveness now and in the next millennium."
Trade Opportunities
"Or as we consider what we do so well in America, keep in mind:
• That fewer than half the population of the world, about three billion people, have ever placed a phone call,
• At the most, 50 percent enjoy daily access to electric power,
• And that fewer than 11 percent of the world's people have ever owned a car. In fact, if the auto ownership in China, now about two cars per thousand people, were to come up only to the level of Rumania that would equal a market expansion of 60 million more autos."

U.S. Product Liability
"Let me share with you the specific impact of product liability posted on the World Wide Web site of one of our competitors, DuPont. Regarding the issue of product liability, DuPont states:
"Product liability is largely a U.S. problem for DuPont. The company has fewer than 20 lawsuits outside the U.S., but nearly 5,000 personal injury lawsuits in the U.S. In 1995, slightly more than half of the company's sales came from outside the U.S.; however, 95 percent of DuPont's legal costs are incurred in the U.S."
Wishful Thinking
"This might be called the `Field of Dreams' assumption: `If you build the network, they will come.' Our experience to date suggests something a bit less encouraging."