Rarely Used Senior Quotes

Don’t run down your checklist. There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you’ve been doing. Sometimes this is appropriate, but it is rarely what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help.

You are a product to dragnet surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, Comcast and Verizon. Your ideas are rarely your own, rather you are little more than a pawn to their perception steering initiatives to get you to read, believe and buy what they put in front of you. The first step to breaking out of this faux reality matrix is to stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Comcast and Facebook.

In my experience, historical analogy is the analytic method of choice for senior foreign policy makers trying to get a handle on world events unfolding in real time. When trying to understand a new problem, they rarely use or even read analyses informed by social science methods such as game theory, statistical data, or randomized control trials. And logically, these analogies are made to historical cases with which the individuals are most familiar. I watched this play out dozens of times during my five years in government, and it was particularly striking during our struggles to understand the Arab Spring, and especially events in Egypt in the winter of 2011.

The Phlegmatic-Sanguine Person (PHLEG-SAN) These people are mostly seen as introverts. They are most peaceful people who go forgo their rights in order to live peacefully with others. Their temperament combination makes them very ideal people to get along with. Strengths of the PHLEG-SAN person They are gentle people who are honored in any group they find themselves. They are also very thoughtful and diplomatic. They are dependable and will rarely let the secret confided to them by friends. They have self-control. They are rarely seen exchanging words with people. They prefer forfeiting their rights and living peacefully with people to demanding these, which may lead to married relations. They enjoy the quiet life. They are the types who tell jokes without laughing. while others are laughing, they remain quiet, as if the humor came from somewhere else. It seems all fields of work are open to them. For example, they are good accountants, registrars, ministers, mechanics, teachers, and counsellors. This group of people do not enjoy trading activities but can do them when motivated Weaknesses of the PHLEG-SAN person These types of people are almost similar to their counterpart- the SAN-PHLEG. They lack motivation. They need to be motivated else they will leave their responsibilities undone. They allow themselves to be instructed and directed by people around them. Thus here, they fall victim to the sin of negligence. They procrastinate and often come out late. As senior officers their trays are always full of pending letters. They build shells around themselves and avoid many people and activities that could be useful to them in future. They let golden opportunities to pass by peacefully. Unless they develop personal discipline, they may never develop their natural potential. They are fearful; they need little motivation to put them to action. They lead a too relaxed life; they can even fall asleep while waiting for friends at the reception. A person of this temperament can always move peacefully with the strong willed CHOL-MEL person.

Nash and her husband, Roy Stone, have worked for the Los Angeles library for a combined total of seventy-nine years. (Not long after I interviewed them, they both retired.) It was Nash’s purse that Glen Creason and Stone had been looking for immediately after the fire, when they discovered that the Patent Room had melted. Nash and Stone are library people. Besides being a senior librarian, Stone had been the head of the Librarians’ Guild for many years. He once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns. He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge, that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind.