Tag: Leadership
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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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The Mandela Effect
I love the sentiment of this quote; achieving success sometimes means you have to be a bit different. What’s more interesting, is that the entire world and internet attributes it to Dr. Seuss. Yet it never appears in his writings and was never something he said. Like Sinbad’s Shazam movie and the Fruit of the…
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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…