PlaysWithTrucks

Tag: Leadership

  • Surprise Star Trek

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    Scott Duvall
    in ,

    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…

  • Sports Radio Leadership

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • Winning isn’t Everything

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • Segal’s Law

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • Progress is Impossible without change

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • The Mandela Effect

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    Scott Duvall
    in

    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…

  • Changing everything, fixing nothing.

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • The Original

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…

  • What are you looking for?

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    Scott Duvall
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    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,…

  • Cloudy with a chance of wrong.

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    Scott Duvall
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    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…