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."

How to cope with jerks at work

Q&A: How to cope with jerks at work

Thomas Hoffman

December 12, 2006 (Computerworld) We've all worked with them at one time or another: people who are disruptive, abusive or otherwise demeaning or mean-spirited. In short, they're jerks. Incendiary co-workers are more than a workplace distraction, however. Indeed, a growing body of research is being conducted in the U.S. and Europe that examines the impact bullies have on productivity and financial performance. Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke yesterday with Robert Sutton, the author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, which is scheduled to be published by Warner Business Books on Feb. 22, about his inspiration for the book and some of the lessons that managers can draw from it. Excerpts from that interview follow:

What inspired you to write this book? It's partly the result of the endless parade of [jerks] that I've had to deal with in my life. But it primarily stems from a department I used to work in here at Stanford and how invoking the rule helped promote a better workplace. Also, I wrote a Harvard Business Review article on the topic that produced hundreds of e-mails, whereas previous articles I've written for them might have generated 10 or 15 e-mails each.

Is it harder to get away with being a jerk in today's politically correct work environment? Or are jerks learning how to adapt? I think you can make the argument that it's more socially acceptable than it used to be because we're putting people under an enormous amount of pressure at work, such as holding them to performance requirements. Increasingly, law firms track their profits per partner -- it doesn't matter how much of an a--hole you are.

At one law firm where I was asked to speak, the CEO called me and yelled at me about my airfare, even though it had been agreed to earlier. The first thing a senior partner said to me when I walked into the auditorium before my presentation was this: "Our law firm used to be a balance of humanity and economics. Now it's all about economics." It may be getting better in terms of political correctness, but people are more skilled in many ways. It's probably not against the law to be an equal opportunity a--hole.

You mention in the book that companies such as Southwest Airlines and Intel have instituted "no a--hole rules." What are these, and how are managers able to apply them? At Intel, they have this constructive confrontation norm where you can fight but you can't be too nasty.

My favorite one is about a company called SuccessFactors, an enterprise software firm in San Mateo. They've been around for almost seven years. Lars Dalgaard is the founder. For the first six and a half years of their existence, they said they had a "no a--hole rule" and had employees sign an agreement that they wouldn't be a--holes. Lars recently came up with a list of the company's accomplishments, including not having hired any a--holes in the first six and a half years. Then they changed the wording from "a--holes" to "jerks" because some of the customers didn't like the language. I'm going to visit them next week and have more information about it on my blog.

You also mention a lot of high-profile people in the book by name, including former Sunbeam CEO Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap and outgoing U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton. Any concerns about legal retribution? Anybody can sue anybody. I was very careful. The way I defined a--holes was someone who was consistently demeaning. I'm very careful to say things in my opinion and to cite other sources. Who knows, I may get sued, but I was very careful about how I labeled people to protect myself. I quoted a Wired magazine story about some people who have worked with him [who] have their "Steve-Jobs-the-a--hole" story.

For some organizations, the "no a--hole rule" is used to help prevent disruptive people from joining your organization in the first place. But what if your department already has a pre-existing jerk? What steps can managers take to either keep this person in check or flush them out of the organization? The first thing is what's going down with the person right in front of you. If you demean people in public, you can face a lawsuit. The second thing is to bring up a performance evaluation. Some organizations don't have the guts to demote people who are consistently demeaning. Other organizations have demoted people who are disruptive and demeaning and have lowered their pay.

At one Fortune 100 company, a new CEO took over and assembled an a--hole hit list. The CEO wanted to get rid of these people immediately, but their lawyers told them they'd have a bunch of lawsuits on their hands so they had to do it more systematically.

What steps can someone take to deal with a boss who's a jerk without putting their own careers in jeopardy? The best thing you can do is not take the job in the first place. Empirical studies have shown that if you work for a boss that's a jerk, you start acting like them. But if you can't get out, there are three different things you can do. First, you've got to learn the power of indifference, learning not to [care] when you can't control the situation. The other two things are to focus on this notion of reframing things. If you can't leave, become more detached in other ways. Have shorter meetings or avoid them at meetings or contact them as much as possible by phone or e-mail. Even prisoners of war can find little ways of gaining control and exacting revenge.

A couple of weeks ago, this guy described to me how he was flying back to L.A. from New York. He had this abusive passenger seated in front of him and he said to the airline employee, "How can you take this kind of abuse?" The woman said with a straight face, "Mr. Smith is going to Los Angeles but his luggage is going to Nairobi." It's this little notion of taking control. If you look at the basic ways to cope with these situations, find the little nooks and crannies where you can exercise actual and perceived control.

How can employees fight back? HP has always taken its employee surveys very seriously, especially in the days when Lew Platt was running the company. There was a boss in the '80s there who was really nasty and tended to [rush] in and take credit when something good happened. On her evaluations from her employees she typically received ones [1 being bad and 5 being excellent].

I don't know if you've attempted to quantify this, but has there been a rise in the number or percentage of jerks in the workplace? Or has this remained a constant? I don't know the answer to this. But there has been a dawning awareness in U.S. academia to study abusiveness in the workplace. I'm confident in saying that in Europe, the U.K. and Scandinavian countries, there is a societal and legal movement against it. And we're starting to see this in the United States.

You write about a metric called TCA, or total cost of a--holes to an organization. How did you come up with this? How does it work? This is like an open-source book. A management consultant sent me a note about the TCA concept and how expensive they can be and what the hidden costs are. I asked if he would let me publish his name and he never got back to me.

If there's one message you'd like people to take away from this book, what would it be? The reason the book is important is not just because there's a business case for it, but the reason I wanted to write the book is that we only have so many days on this planet. So if you're experiencing a life that's filled with constant abuse, you end up having a terrible life. It's just not worth putting up with that kind of abuse.

How corporations are resorting to cheating the customer to boost their bottom lines.

Companies across the globe are increasingly resorting to downright cheating when it comes to their bottom lines. Therefore you have increasing cases where banks are prompt to increase the interest rates on lending’s and reluctant to do the same for deposits held by them. Take for instance the case of home loans offered by ICICI and HDFC among other banks, every time the RBI tightens the liquidity in the market, both these banks are prompt in sending letters to all the loaners about the change in the installment or period of the loan. These banks hold huge deposits often held in small amounts. They make it very difficult the deposit holder to liquidate his deposit and renew the same at a higher rate. The concept of automatically increasing the rate of interest on deposits does not exist in the lexicon of these banks. I see no reason why fixed deposit holders should suffer when banks fail to increase the rate on deposits while calmly increasing them for the lenders.

Many banks charge a heft charge for returned instruments and make a huge profit out of this. There was a time, when bank would call you up and advise you that your account is having a shortfall and what you wanted to do to clear the presented instruments. All this civility has disappeared. Recently I had to suffer a charge of 300 for a returned cheque when the balance in my account was short by 50 rupees. And I had just the day before deposited an amount of 9000 in to my account. When confronted, the bank refused to take onus of informing the customer and was shameful enough to force the charge to my account. And this is a leading MNC bank based out of Hong Kong that I am talking about.

Direct debits or electronic transfers are another way that the banks are scamming you. Once you authorize a direct debit, the bank will promptly remove money from your account but will not transfer the same to the recipient till the last date draws near. You lose on interest; they gain by having a larger float of free capital. No wonder more and more banks want you to sign up for direct debit in cohorts with the service providers.

I have found that the co-operative banks will give you a much higher level of service than these so called MNC /International/Private banks but you run the risk of instability of these banks. This problem can be overcome by having a deposit of less than 1 lac per account, which is guaranteed by the Credit Guarantee Scheme.

Cheating the customer is the name of the game when it comes to the realm of credit cards. More often than not, if the card holder makes a payment directly to the bank (and not to a drop box from where it is collected and credited to your account via a third party) your payment is more likely to go missing than being credited to your account. Many banks routinely shred cheques received directly by them and then slap late fees on customers. Many customers just fail to take up the matter with the bank and this translates to free income for the bank.

For credit card holders the unwritten rule that should be followed is not to have your account with the same bank as that which has issued you the credit card. Credit card companies will often automatically debit your account and clean up your bank account if you default on credit card payments. The fact that the banks have the mandate to directly clean out your account actually make the credit card a secured credit line available at 13.5% per annum and you are paying up to 45% per annum for that. RBI continues to sleep over all these violations. The magic is in numbers, therefore when you receive a seemingly free credit card, beware of all the dirty tricks that the credit card company has in store for you. Because no matter that the credit card has come to you free, the issuer has ensured that he will be able to fleece you in some way or another.

Phone companies are also notorious for using foul methods of inflating your bill. Even an error of 10 per customer can net a company 1 Crore per month in free windfall and believe me they are just doing that. With no independent source of audit, these companies are getting away with murder. Companies and their captains speak so much for transparency in government, but ask them as to how transparent their own companies are and you will have a lot of red faces. Phone companies make it extremely difficult for you to surrender your connection. While they will sell you one through thousands of outlets, but you have to travel many a mile to surrender one. The moment you talk of signing off, they turn stone cold and want you to clear all their payments before you quit the service provider. And if you have a deposit with them and want that to be adjusted against the dues, they throw processes and procedure in your face and tell you that please wait for three to six months to receive your money back while you cough up their dues up front.

Reliance Energy is another company that does not fight shy of making a quick buck from its customers. Any delayed payment is promptly fined citing a MERC directive to do so while prompt payments hardly receive the promised incentive. I can vouch for this as I happened to make a double payment during a billing cycle which resulted in a credit outstanding in my account. Next month when I got a bill, I did not have to pay anything and as I had paid in advance, I expected to get an incentive for early payment, but none was forthcoming. Maybe and RTI application against Reliance Energy will reveal the statistics of delayed penalties and early incentives that the company has levied on its customers. With a customer base in excess of 4 million an error of 10 per customer can translate to 40 million of excess income, enough to boost the bottom line of the company.

Ask anyone on the street, do they trust Hutch, Airtel, BPL Mobile, Reliance Telecom, Reliance Energy, Tata Indicom, VSNL, etc with the billing and whether they believe that these companies are honest and you will get a resounding no as your answer.

All this is happening while authorities sleep or connive with these modern day thugs to rob and cheat you in broad daylight

Earlier you could fool the government and get rich by evading excise, customs, sales tax and other duties levied by them, now the government has smartened to these tricks, thus the corporate world has no option but to loot the common man through its bag of dirty tricks.

Shameless Politics and Shameless Politicians

The shocking saga of Navjot Singh Siddhu once again highlights the depths to which our leaders will fall into just to hold on to the chair. Convicted in a road rage case of 1988 Siddhu instead of feeling remorse or repenting for his actions and lying all along for the last 18 years that he was not even present at the scene of the crime, is seen smiling and celebrating on camera. This after he has been incarcerated in the Patiala jail for a period of 3 days.

He now proposes to move the court for annulment of his sentence to contest an election to the highest law making body of the country! In the absence of his making it to the election, the party with a difference (BJP) proposes to field his wife, amply proving to all and sundry that when it comes to politics, it is no different than the RJD of Lallu Yadav.

And in the Local Body Elections to Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Shiv Sena, the incumbent party sacks 52 of its sitting corporators telling them that they have made enough money, now they should give a chance to others. This coming from the mouth of firebrand but aging tiger Balasaheb Thakerey.

What else can one say, this is indeed the era of shameless politics and shameless politicians.

How does one go about changing a system that is completely rotten

One thing that rankles me all the time is the thought about how one can go about changing a system that is completely rotten to the core?

Does one follow the 'Rang de Basanti' formula of eliminating the people who are responsible for the mess or does one follow the Gandhigiri promoted by 'Lage Raho Munna Bhai' or is there some other method which can bring change in the system.

What system am I talking about? It is the rampant corruption that exists both in the public and the private sector. We have not only become corrupt in our financial transactions but also in thought and approach to anything that we do. For example, any charge of corruption thrown at any of the leaders, be it Chaggan Bhujbal or Sharad Pawar in the Telgi Scam case sticks rather than us giving them the benefit of doubt. The same applies to the policemen arrested in the case. Mr Bhujbal along with his nephew Sameer Dighe institutionalized the concept of auctioning all plum police postings. And I am sure the inspiration must have come from the fact that he himself must have paid a hefty sum to get the Home Ministers post!

How does one go about changing all this. To participate in the so called process of democrary is very difficult and is frought with danger to life and limb as the political class in India consists more of the lumpen elements of the society who will not think twice about neutralizing any threat to their bread and butter.

Hi Friends and fellow Indians...

Often we have ideas that can be easily translated into action and that can lead to a better life for each one of us but more often than not we do not have the collective strength and the wherewithal to go and implement such ideas.

Through this blog, I wish to invite every thinking Indian to contribute their small but significant ideas that may finally lead to the awakening of India as dreamt of by such stalwarts as Rabindra Nath Tagore in his classic 'Where the Mind Is Without Fear..'

One rule applies. No idea however absurd it may sound to any one posting on this site will be criticised. Any person doing so will have to come up with two ideas for each idea that he/she criticises!

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