Category: SignPosts
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The Power of Vision
Every year at the PFMI, I teach a class about data. It’s a scripted show honed over almost a decade’s worth of learning and experience of working with data. If a student walks out with anything, I want it to be this: Data analysis starts with questions, not data. You can take any data set…
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Original Creation
Not every message that lands on the board is a direct quote, a few of them are original creations. There’s a limited amount of space and a fixed number of letters I can use to create a message, leading to shortened quotes or lyrics that are randomly pulled from the middle of a song. Other…
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The master of the colloquialism
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) is considered the greatest humorist the US has ever produced. His work “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is considered a Great American Novel for capturing the essence of the American style. A key to Twain’s writings was his mastery of the local language, the colloquialisms and speech of…
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This isn’t the rocket guy
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. -Jean Luc Godard (1930-2022) Godard was a pioneer of the French New Wave of cinema in the 1960’s, transforming movies by rejecting tradition and finding new ways of telling stories. The quote is a fun one for me. Whenever you’re…
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Surprise Star Trek
This quote often gets mis-interpreted from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The concepts of turning disadvantages into advantages is all over that treatise, and likely influenced the writers of Star Trek. Yeah, it’s another Star Trek Quote. Sorry. In “Loud as a Whisper”, from Season 2 of The Next Generation, a deaf negotiator joins the…
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Sports Radio Leadership
While I try to learn the history or provenance of every quote on the board, sadly this is one I don’t know. I first heard this saying from a sports radio host here in Chicago, proving that only most of AM talk radio is a veritable wasteland. The quote stuck with me and ended up…
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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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Mostly for the money
You can’t work in trucking without having memorized the entire script of Smokey and The Bandit. It’s part of the entrance exam. For those who haven’t seen it, the 1977 comedy stars Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Sally Field, and Jackie Gleason, alongside a T-Top Trans Am, Kenworth W-900A, and the CB Radio in a fast-paced…