Category: Leadership
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Winning isn’t Everything
Some quotes I come across hit me like a ton of bricks. This is one of them. There is a chronic challenge in today’s world that everything must be framed as a Zero-Sum Game. That if there is a winner, someone who gains something, there must be someone who loses in equal value. Even debates…
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Segal’s Law
The above quote is a slightly modified version of “Segal’s Law”: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. The quote itself traces back to the The San Diego Union newspaper, initially publishing the quote as a humorous joke. From there, it bounces around through various newspapers, and in…
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Progress is Impossible without change
On the surface, this seems like another generic “leadership” quote you’d see tacked up on a wall in a random conference room. At face value, it’s a simple and quick message about openness to change. The full quote from George Bernard Shaw is this: “Progress is Impossible without Change, and those who cannot change their…
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Changing everything, fixing nothing.
I am a big believer in process improvement. Pick whatever methodology you want. For 95% of the people and companies in this world, it won’t make a difference whether you’re a Six Sigma company or a Lean Company or a TQM Company or something else. They’re kinda all the same to immature companies. Almost every…
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The Original
I honestly don’t recall where I cribbed this quote from. The “Absence of Accidents” part appears in a few different books and sources. Each author tends to define the “presence” part a few different ways. This was one of the first quotes I put on the board, appearing early in 2020. Since that time, I…
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What are you looking for?
When investigating accidents and failures, professionals seek to find cause. This is a different concept than finding fault. Causes are factual, faults are personal. Exercising the separation between these two items is critical to creating progress. Good leaders avoid playing the blame game, and even when individuals have a direct action in a root cause,…
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Cloudy with a chance of wrong.
Humans are emotional creatures. When something doesn’t work, it’s normal to react. We can be disappointed, angry, shameful, prideful. We put effort into things, and we want to succeed. There’s like four-thousand different inspirational quotes about dealing with failures. All sorts of successful people will gladly tell you about all the times they weren’t. But…
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It is the start, not the end.
This quote comes from the book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In it, Dekker explores the “bad apple theory”, whereby our operations and SOP’s are inherently safe except for those few unreliable people working within it. Dekker questions the idea that concluding “human error” is the end of a safety…
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He’s Dead, Jim.
In the original run of the Star Trek television show (1966-69), the writers had a nasty habit of introducing a new character in the episode, usually all part of the security or engineering teams who wore red uniforms. Our heroes would gallivant off to some dangerous planet or situation with these new friends, who subsequently…
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There’s a Rule for Every Conceivable Situation.
“Every Ferengi business transaction is governed by 285 Rules of Acquisition to ensure a fair and honest deal for all parties concerned… well most of them anyway.” It’ll take far too long to explain the Ferengi, The Grand Nagus, and The Rules. Go watch more Star Trek. But nothing says a fictional race of capitalist…