How To Revise Key Quotes

Playfulness is the cornerstone of emotional fulfilment, a key to insight and volition. It can be activated by any kind of everyday task from gardening to washing up. Although we need to earn a living, and although there are many practical tasks we have to perform, living as playfully as possible makes our existence infinitely more worthwhile.

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

It was in Cleveland that Magic Slim became the most successful pornographic film producer in America. His training center was a key link in a human trafficking supply chain stretching from the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to the United States. Trafficking accounts for an estimated $32 billion in annual trade with sex slavery and pornographic film production accounting for the greatest percentage. The girls arrived at Slim’s building young and naive, they left older and wiser. This was a classic value chain with each link making a contribution.  Slim’s trainers were the best, and it showed in the final product. Each class of girls was judged on the merits. The fast learners went on to advanced training. They learned proper etiquette, social skills and party games. They learned how to dress, apply makeup and discuss world events.  Best in-class were advertised in international style magazines with code words. These codes were known only to select clients and certain intermediaries approved by Slim. This elaborate distribution system was part of Slim’s business model, his clients paid an annual subscription fee for the on-line dictionary. The code words and descriptions were revised monthly.  An interested client would pay an access fee for further information that included a set of professional  photographs, a video and voice recordings of the model addressing the client by name.  Should the client accept, a detailed travel itinerary was submitted calling for first class travel and accommodation.  Slim required a letter of understanding spelling out terms and conditions and a 50% deposit. He didn’t like contracts, his word was his bond, everyone along the chain knew that. Slim's business was booming.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off. I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet? The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling. It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

Q. How can I be certain that what I fear will happen will never really happen? A. Sadly, the answer is you can't be certain! If you suffer from OCD you probably want a 100 percent guarantee that you will never do anything dangerous or that no harm will ever come to you or your family members. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. If I think about it, I know that there is no guarantee that I won't be hit by a car coming home from work today - but somehow my brain automatically accepts the very small chance of this happening and so permits me to go on living my life. More than two thousand years ago the Buddha (a great psychologist besides being a religious teacher) warned that one of the key things that makes us suffer is that we always want more than we will actually get - whether what we want is material like gold and jewels, or (my addition) in the case of OCD, more certainty than you will ever achieve. Thus the solution the Buddha might have offered you in northern India those thousands of years ago might have been something like this: "To stop suffering you must learn to accept that you will never achieve as much certainty as you want, no matter how much you pursue it; so it is up to you to choose: Either accept this truth and live your life happily, or fight against this truth and continue to suffer." Let me say it again for emphasis: you will never be certain that you won't act on the urges you have, or that the terrible things you fear will happen will not actually happen - but I can assure you that the odds of these things actually happening are small enough that it is not worth wasting your life trying (in vain) to get 100 percent certainty. Better to trust in yourself, your religious beliefs, or in evolution having prepared us well for surviving in this world. If evidence from brain studies better helps to convince you this is true, brain imaging studies of OCD sufferers now suggest that there really is something wrong with their "certainty system"; whatever automatically lets someone without OCD feel that things are OK does not function correctly in the OCD sufferer's brain (who then tries to convince himself that everything is OK, eventually becoming tired and frustrated when he cannot use other brain functions to achieve 100 percent certainty).

four key principles: (1) taking the initiative to reach out to others; (2) showing genuine interest in people; (3) treating others with respect and kindness; and (4) valuing others and yourself as unique individuals who have much to share and offer one another.

Pieconomics goes beyond CSR and implies a shift in thinking on what companies’ responsibilities are, how leaders should run their businesses, and how both companies and leaders should be held accountable. There are four key shifts.

Why admit that mind influences the body somewhat, yet act as though the organs, hormones, nerves, bones, etc., outweigh the power of Spirit? Controlled by this kind of thinking, people unthinkingly repeat learned reactions. They lean on the artificial or the unintelligent, never discerning how this deprives them of the available superiority of divine Mind.

As I read this book, a key insight was that Multipliers are hard-edged managers. There is nothing soft about these leaders. They expect great things from their people and drive them to achieve extraordinary results. Another insight that resonated with me was that people actually get smarter and more capable around Multipliers. That is, people don’t just feel smarter; they actually become smarter. They can solve harder problems, adapt more quickly, and take more intelligent action.

usually does not present much of a problem. Some analysts use t-tests with ordinal rather than continuous data for the testing variable. This approach is theoretically controversial because the distances among ordinal categories are undefined. This situation is avoided easily by using nonparametric alternatives (discussed later in this chapter). Also, when the grouping variable is not dichotomous, analysts need to make it so in order to perform a t-test. Many statistical software packages allow dichotomous variables to be created from other types of variables, such as by grouping or recoding ordinal or continuous variables. The second assumption is that the variances of the two distributions are equal. This is called homogeneity of variances. The use of pooled variances in the earlier formula is justified only when the variances of the two groups are equal. When variances are unequal (called heterogeneity of variances), revised formulas are used to calculate t-test test statistics and degrees of freedom.7 The difference between homogeneity and heterogeneity is shown graphically in Figure 12.2. Although we needn’t be concerned with the precise differences in these calculation methods, all t-tests first test whether variances are equal in order to know which t-test test statistic is to be used for subsequent hypothesis testing. Thus, every t-test involves a (somewhat tricky) two-step procedure. A common test for the equality of variances is the Levene’s test. The null hypothesis of this test is that variances are equal. Many statistical software programs provide the Levene’s test along with the t-test, so that users know which t-test to use—the t-test for equal variances or that for unequal variances. The Levene’s test is performed first, so that the correct t-test can be chosen. Figure 12.2 Equal and Unequal Variances The term robust is used, generally, to describe the extent to which test conclusions are unaffected by departures from test assumptions. T-tests are relatively robust for (hence, unaffected by) departures from assumptions of homogeneity and normality (see below) when groups are of approximately equal size. When groups are of about equal size, test conclusions about any difference between their means will be unaffected by heterogeneity. The third assumption is that observations are independent. (Quasi-) experimental research designs violate this assumption, as discussed in Chapter 11. The formula for the t-test test statistic, then, is modified to test whether the difference between before and after measurements is zero. This is called a paired t-test, which is discussed later in this chapter. The fourth assumption is that the distributions are normally distributed. Although normality is an important test assumption, a key reason for the popularity of the t-test is that t-test conclusions often are robust against considerable violations of normality assumptions that are not caused by highly skewed distributions. We provide some detail about tests for normality and how to address departures thereof. Remember, when nonnormality cannot be resolved adequately, analysts consider nonparametric alternatives to the t-test, discussed at the end of this chapter. Box 12.1 provides a bit more discussion about the reason for this assumption. A combination of visual inspection and statistical tests is always used to determine the normality of variables. Two tests of normality are the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (also known as the K-S test) for samples with more than 50 observations and the Shapiro-Wilk test for samples with up to 50 observations. The null hypothesis of

As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t. In other words, we can’t see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving. But these kinds of misperceptions ultimately deceive us. And this has consequences in business—and for the way we manage. When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success. If you run a business that is covered with any frequency by the media, you may face another challenge. Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words. If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype. I say this knowing that it is difficult to resist, especially when we are flying high and tempted to think we have done everything right. But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.

Finding someone’s native genius is a key that unlocks discretionary effort. It propels people to go beyond what is required and to offer their full intelligence.

For example, let’s say that during your analysis you discover something indicating that the client’s key issue is internal, not related to its competitors. Instead of answering all the questions in the competitor section of the framework, revise your hypothesis to say that the client’s key issue is internal, and switch to the company portion of the framework (or in some cases, create a custom issue tree).

Here is the logic behind multiplication: 1.  Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2.  All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3.  Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment. For example, when Apple Inc. needed to achieve rapid growth with flat resources in one division, they didn’t expand their sales force. Instead, they gathered the key players across the various job functions, took a week to study the problem, and collaboratively developed a solution. They changed the sales model to utilize competency centers and better leverage their best salespeople and deep industry experts in the sales cycle. They achieved year-over-year growth in the double digits with virtually flat resources.

What is your One-PHRASE Strategy that likely upsets customers (Apple’s “closed system”) but is key to making a ton of money and blocking your competition?

As Quine points out, when we are told that the judgement 'All bachelors are unmarried males,' is analytically true, we must immediately ask how we came to know this. Somone may appeal to a dictionary, claiming that 'unmarried' and 'male' make up the definition of the word 'bachelor.' However, it is simply not accurate to view a dictionary as a book of analytic truths. First of all, as Quine goes on to show, the work of the lexicographer is largely that of an empirical scientist. The lexicographer bases his definitions on synonymy observed in a natural language. Languages are learned through experience; we are not born with a built-in a priori vocabulary. Children (usually) learn words not by looking them up in a dictionary, but by listening to others communicate. In other words, the lexicographer works on a Wittgensteinian principle, generally determining the meaning of a word from its observed use in a language. But can the fallible, limited observations of dictionary writers serve as the basis of absolutely certain analytic truths? Why should we accept a dictionary as law? Lexicography is far from being a perfect science...Clearly then, definitions cannot serve as the basis for analyticity. Besides, synonymies are the result of observed patterns in a language. Because they are based on empirical factors, on any normal account of the analytic-synthetic distinction, synonyms would qualify as synthetic judgements subject to revision. Thus, trying to root analyticity in synonymy ends up making analytic truths depend on synthetic truths! The observations of a lexicographer are, of course, fallible, and therefore cannot provide the key to certainty that analytic judgements are supposed to provide. Any account of the analytic-synthetic distinction based on word meanings is bound to fail.

the key questions are more important than ever: What is the problem? How valuable is the solution? Can we provide it profitably? Where will our competition come from? When I started out with computers, I believed what the manufacturers’ promotional materials promised. I grew into a skeptical, nontrusting cynic, but one who believes more than most in the potential technology has to improve our lives. What I learned on the journey was that we are all humans, and technology exists to serve us, not the reverse. The challenge is to resolve people issues, not software ones.