Cohesion is the force with which the molecules of a body cleave together. In a company, cohesion represents the pulling together (and keeping together) of the employees. To have cohesion, employees must know “who belongs” and “who is not one of us.” In a living company, cohesion and diversity exist together. The company is clearly a unit, with a single identity; but the people and substructures within that unit show a rich variety. They are composed differently from each other; they have different characteristics and different potential. But they are all part of a cohesive whole.Arie De Geus
The Living Company - Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment, (p. 104), Longview Publishing Limited
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Crystal and my partners at Starbucks, like Kester and Charlie, had given me a chance to work and live and see things a new way. The least I could do was to help them by not reverting to my old, prideful, control-freak self. Yes, I had to admit, I had been a control freak, just as much as Ford or any other client. I had loved ordering people to work overtime or change a headline or even bring me a cup of coffee….I had been a bad boss. It was time to be a real good Partner. I promised myslef that I would not get so pumped up with ambition or a crazy self-righteous pride in anything I did that I lost my perspective again. I had a picture of letting my old life go, like you would discard a damp and smelly pair of old swimming trunks. I had traded my pin-striped suit for a green apron. A Master of the Universe costume for something that said was there to serve - not to rule. You can’t serve if you try to control the people you serve, I realized. I wasn’t some know-it-all authority, a pompous lifeguard ordering people around on the beach. I was just another swimmer, now riding a wave I’d never known existed.Michael Gates Gill
How Starbucks Saved My Life , (p. 175-176), Gotham Books, 2007
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All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.
Tyler Cowen
Marginal Revolution, 12/10/2008
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Today’s best young employees, the ones on whom future success will depend, are demanding that employers help make them better performers. It seems that young people understood the new nature of today’s economy before a lot of CEOs did, and they insist on employers who will keep developing them. Geoff Colvin
Talent is Overrated , (p. 127), Portfolio, 2008
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It is quite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history. There were the poetes maudits, like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud, scorned by society and later worshipped and force-fed to schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after high school dropouts.) Alas, this recognition came a little late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it, or to prop up his romantic life on earth. But there are even more mistreated heroes - the very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes, who saved our lives, who helped us avoid disasters. They left no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution. We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about, never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were neer aware of - precisely because they were successful. Our ingratitude toward the poetes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness. This is a far more vicious kind of ingratitude: the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero.Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan , ( xxii-xxiii ), Random House, 2007
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Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.
Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.
That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.
Big organizations have the most trouble with this, because they don’t notice the correlation. It’s hidden by their momentum and layers of bureaucracy. So a mediocre phone rep or a mediocre chef may not appear to be doing as much damage as they actually are.
The flip side of this is that when you are at the top, the best in the world, the industry leader, a tiny increase in effort and quality can translate into huge gains. For a while, anyway.
Seth Godin
Seth Godin’s Blog , 11/7/2008
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Reaching goals is fine for an annual plan. Only reaching one’s potential is fine for a life.
Max DePree
Leadership Jazz , Currency, 1992
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From the spiritual point of view, work is a matter of being, of character, of what makes man man. It is not a matter of what society demands. Your identity, unless you work, is merely a theoretical identity, for you must manifest it, you must externalize it, lest the theory just collapse and you become a zero…A Christian understands that only in creative activity do we externalize the identity we have as men made in the image of God. This, then, is the true basis for work.
Udo Middelman
Pro-Existence , (p. 35-36), InterVarsity Press, 1974
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We are warned not to waste time but we are brought up to waste our lives.
Eric Hoffer,
The Temper of Our Time: Essays, 1967, Harper & Row, (p. 30)
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
The Passionate State of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (section 33), Hopewell Publications
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In a rapidly changing world, some things may happen sooner than you expect. But you should never count on good stuff to happen quickly. It is my experience that everything good takes longer than you would like. You have to allow for that.
Roger McNamee
The New Normal , (p. 123), Portfolio, 2004
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The global economy is nothing new. It existed in the days of Christ himself, protected and encouraged by the Roman Empire, and extending to the very limits of the known world. The spread of the Christian faith is itself a product of globalization, and the first moves towards a Christian theology are contained in letters sent by St. Paul to the far outposts of the empire. What is new is not so much the global economy but the speed with which ideas, information and assets can be transferred around the world. This speed has shrunk all distances to negligible proportions and has enabled firms in one part of the globe to compete openly with firms in another, whatever the distance between them. This fact presents new opportunities and new dangers. The opportunities are obvious: new markets, new partnerships, new forms of human life with which to stimulate commercial imagination. The dangers are less evident, but equally real: the hostility provoked by insensitive marketing, by aggressive competition, by manners and images that are offensive to the rooted values and religious beliefs and by products that are marketed regardless of their adverse side effects.
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Busines , (p. 120-121), Encounter Books, 2008
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… to give up everything for Christ consists of an internal relinquishment of all our possessions … The standard set before us is not that all Christians take a vow of poverty. Some of us will always be richer and others poorer. Yet all of us are to have a contract with Christ that whenever obedience to him means sacrifice of any degree, even to losing everything we have or to facing prison and death, then obedience is what matters. The obedience will be all the easier if we daily relinquish to him all we possess.
John White
The Golden Cow , (p. 92-93), Inter-Varsity Press, 1979
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At the heart of the company’s “people investment” culture is Pixar University, an on-the-job training program that offers hundreds of courses in art, animation, and filmmaking. All of Pixar’s employees are encouraged to take classes in whatever they like, whether it’s relevant to their job or not. At other studios, there’s a clear distinction between the “creatives,” the “techies,” and the crew. But Pixar’s unique culture doesn’t distinguish between them — everyone who works on the movies is considered an artist. Everyone works together to tell stories, and as such, everyone is encouraged to devote at least four hours of the workweek to class. The classes are filled with people from all levels of the organization: janitors sit next to department heads… No one can make a movie alone, and a team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot. If a script isn’t working, the whole team works together to fix it. The writers, the animators, and the director all pitch in without regard to their official role or job title.
Leander Kahney
Inside Steve’s Brain , (p. 113), Penguin Group, 2008
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Small companies … already have two strikes against them. Of the seven hundred thousand new businesses started this year, only thirty-five thousand (or one in twenty) will be around five years from now. And the primary reason for a small company’s failure is trying to do too many things at once. If you do one thing, and do it well, you can build a reputation that almost guarantees success in the long term. (Unfortunately, you can also starve in the short term, which is why capital is the crucial component of any start-up.)
Al Ries
Focus , (p. 14), Harper Collins, 1996
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