Relevant Business Quotes

Strategy is really the essence of the boards value proposition to the company. The ability to strategize well is the essence of what makes a board relevant.

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

You need a product that can make their lives easier; a product that they need and can relate to as well.

Weighing the relevancy of a new idea, even if you don’t like it determines the rate at which you are going to learn new things and grow.

Someone may have all the technical knowledge, scientific intellect and business know-how but when he/she decides to choose laziness, excuses, procrastination, complaining and other bad attitudes, his/her relevance is meaningless.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In today's constantly evolving economy, business models cannot be static. The business model of each business must be consistently changing and evolving in order to stay relevant and to succeed.

If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.

For those intent on business as usual, the scope of value destruction is growing.

There's relevant data, and there's irrelevant data. In business, it's important to only utilize relevant data.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen .

Once achieved, maintaining relevance requires constant listening, questioning, prototyping and testing.

The bar to become and remain relevant is higher than ever. You need to run faster to stay in the same place, or even likely end up behind. There is a new premium on staying relevant.

You want your target market and your capabilities to be completely in alignment.

Being relevant to your customers only when you’re trying to sell something means choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time.

Adaptability is the new superpower in business - embrace it to thrive.

Business Paradigm Shifting helps companies stay agile in a rapidly changing market landscape.

Since the world around us is always changing, businesses that want continuity should be regularly shifting their paradigm.

A newly defined market will require either new capabilities or a new focus applied to current capabilities.

The primary purpose of the business’ capabilities is to provide superior value to the target market in exchange for money.

Everything the business does should revolve around providing value to the target market.

A target market should be like a lighthouse in a storm to a business

Business capabilities are relative to macro conditions. Based on differences in macro conditions, the economic worth of a capability could differ from one scenario to another.

It's crucial for companies to identify the specific regulatory bodies that apply to their business and ensure their internal financial metrics align with the relevant reporting standards.

Even a single macro change – like an increase in the price of gasoline due to geo-political tensions – can have tremendous effects on a business’ ability to provide value to its customers.

We learn best when we care about what we are doing, when we have choices. We learn best when the work has meaning to us, when it matters. We learn best when we are using our hands and our minds.We learn best when the work we are doing is real and relevant.

In a world where ChatGPT and other AI apps can do many things humans once needed to do themselves or needed to hire other humans to do, the question of ‘how will I add value?’ becomes more relevant than ever.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place whey are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.

A capability is a business’ ability to provide value to customers. A business can only deliver the value it is capable of delivering, and capabilities are key enablers of a business’ ability to exchange value with its target market.

Once the target market is identified, it’s really about putting the business in a position to provide superior value in the most efficient way to that target market thereby enabling the business to earn maximum profit in the exchange.

In the marketplace, small businesses are the face and voice of humanity, which provides them with a great advantage in the Age of the Customer.

If you want to stay relevant, you’re going to have to dive into the domain of the business you’re in

Business Paradigm Shifting helps companies stay relevant to changing customer needs.

Twitter is your window to relevance , but Facebook is your home page for the Social Web

How is transformation built into your company’s corporate structure? This is an important question to answer if you want the company to remain relevant throughout market changes.

A ‘truly global’ firm in 2020 should have the ability to be domestically relevant to consumers in both developed and developing markets – at the same time

Perhaps we are not following Christ all the way or in the right spirit. We are likely, for example, to be a little sparing of the palms and hosannas. We are chary of wielding the scourge of small cords, lest we should offend somebody or interfere with trade. We do not furnish up our wits to disentangle knotty questions about Sunday observance and tribute money, nor hasten to sit at the feet of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. We pass hastily over disquieting jests about making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness and alarming observations about bringing not peace but a sword; nor do we distinguish ourselves by the graciousness by which we sit at meat with publicans and sinners. Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore---and this in the name of the one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame. Let us, in heaven's name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious---others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

There is great wisdom in a business having a system in place for adapting its underlying assumptions and pivoting so that it can continue to survive and thrive in the new reality by reclaiming relevance and providing value to newly defined markets.

If you approach business thinking that you sell products or services, you will eventually become irrelevant to the marketplace. But if you approach business thinking that what you really sell is value, you will always be relevant to the marketplace.

If you get an opportunity that someone offers you, take it. A business school professor of mine told me this 20 years ago, and it's just as relevant today. There are so many times that being a woman of color counts against you. If it ever gives you an advantage, don't feel guilty about it. Those situations are few and far between, and you should just consider each an opportunity.

Even in an age where the answer to almost all of life’s questions is a simple Google search away, we often don’t take the time to read the entire article for the answer. We don’t make time to actively seek out the truth, only the first or most relevant result.

Spend time with your AI candidate/s before using it/them in real mode. "Your future AI tools have to pass an interview for the job". This important step must be based on clear use cases, with the involvement of relevant business representatives. 'Technology trust is a good thing, however control is a better one...

Like large areas of analytic philosophy today, scholasticism, too, preferred to busy itself with the fetishization of fine distinctions on an apparently secure investigative foundation, rather than engaging in the adventure of providing a relevant contribution to the understanding of its own age, with its shifting foundational structures.

Anything a customer can do for themselves is where service stops and relevance begins.

Every interaction in the marketplace produces some kind of evaluation or appraisal opportunity that can be conveyed to others by the person on the receiving end of the interaction.

Every small business has to become a publisher—a publisher of marketing messages and customer resources, and a publisher of stories.

Don’t just be everywhere, be everywhere that your clients are, where you matter most.

SMART is an acronym, standing for goals that are: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant, and Time-bound

One of the key ingredients to creating a lasting brand is the ability to adapt and adjust despite adverse conditions while still staying relevant.

If you don’t have regular and accurate financial statements, you’re driving your business 100 miles an hour down a one-way street the wrong way, at night, in the fog, without lights.

the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

Everything was sharper, clearer, and closer, as though, before, I had been seeing only little bits at a time, not all of it, of all of it but veiled or clouded. What was blocking my view before? Was there a veil between me and the world, or did I have blinkers on that narrowed my vision and kept me looking ahead? I did not know this until now--that I must have had a habit of not looking all around me. It was not that I had taken everything for granted before, but that I could not look at everything at once. Why? Was it so that I would not be tempted to do what I did not have the time or money to do, or so that I would not even think about something too distracting? I had to ignore of much of the world, or turn my thoughts away from it and back to the business at hand, whatever that might be...I used to think these places had to remain at just this distance, that I should long for them and that they should be almost imaginary, and that I should never visit them. Now, for a while, feeling as though I were outside my life, I thought I could visit them. At the same time, I felt closer to strangers. It was as thought something had been taken away that used to stand between me and them. I don't know if this was connected with the feeling that I was not inside my own life anymore. I suppose by "my own life" I mean the habitual worries, plans, and constraints that I thought were no longer even relevant.

It’s not the customer’s duty to be loyal to you; it’s your duty to be loyal to your customers. Focus on quality, relevancy, and the BEST customer service possible. Make sure your business is creating a service experience so good that it inspires loyalty.

Liquidation Value The liquidation value is what the company’s assets would bring at a forced sale. Normally the liquidation value of a going concern has little relevance since the value of an operating business is much greater than its liquidation value.

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential. It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.

One business practice I want to eliminate is the use of microtargeting in political advertising. Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individual voters that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election. Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values. Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that. If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.

many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk-taker class (this form of entrepreneurship is the equivalent of bringing great-looking and marketable children into the world with the sole aim of selling them at age four). We can easily identify them by their ability to write a convincing business plan.

In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter’s school. It explains how it’s possible for an extroverted scientist to behave with reserve in her laboratory, for an agreeable person to act hard-nosed during a business negotiation, and for a cantankerous uncle to treat his niece tenderly when he takes her out for ice cream. As these examples suggest, Free Trait Theory applies in many different contexts, but it’s especially relevant for introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal.

Governments and public sector organizations across the world are trying to balance essential, and often conflicting, demands: to deliver better, more relevant public services centred on the needs of the citizens and businesses they serve; to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of their operations; and to reinvent supply chains to deliver services quickly, cheaply and effectively.

you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

The people who have been known as PR experts—and still go by that title—have now turned into a combina- tion of publishers, reporters, and editors. We are publishers because we own media. We control the social media profiles and pages of our clients. We have their blogs and their websites. We are reporters because we have to fill up all those media chan- nels with relevant content. We are editors because that content has got to be created, designed, arranged, structured, and presented in the best way pos- sible so that it can be convincing, attention-grabbing, and—most important—efficient.

You didn’t warn us about this, Readier,’ said Stowley resentfully. Gilt waved his hands. ‘We must speculate to accumulate!’ he said. ‘The Post Office? Trickery and sleight of hand. Oh, von Lipwig is an ideas man, but that’s all he is. He’s made a splash, but he’s not got the stamina for the long haul. Yet as it turns out he will do us a favour. Perhaps we have been . . . a little smug, a little lax, but we have learned our lesson! Spurred by the competition we are investing several hundred thousand dollars—’ ‘Several hundred?’ said Greenyham. Gilt waved him into silence, and continued: ‘—several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening co-operation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission.’ An awed silence followed.

Service" is the motto of the advertiser, of big business, and of fraudulent finance. And of others, too. Listen to this: "I expect the judiciary to understand that the nation does not exist for their conveniences, but that justice exists to serve the nation." That was Hitler yesterday—and that is what becomes of "service," when the community, and not the work, becomes its idol. There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

The first true newspapers, which conveyed information from around the world and were intended for a wide audience, started to be circulated in the early seventeenth century….By 1640, there were nine newspapers in Amsterdam alone…A few decades later there were hundreds of dailies across Europe. The news had finally become a business. Anything that might pique readers’ interest and boost sales was considered newsworthy by the publishers, regardless of whether it was actually important. This fundamental fraud - the new being sold as the relevant - has persisted to this day. It remains the dominant model in print, online, on social media, the radio and television.

When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, or a lump of butter, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons, in a process called "transition." There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their atoms, and suddenly a ray of light shines on them. Imagine a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration. Something similar happens with the electrons, if a portion of the light happens to catch their natural vibration. It shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of light, that glass-shattering "note," is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as "color.".... The best way I've found of understanding this is to think not so much of something "being" a color but of it "doing" a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing, the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the "red" tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance - absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related. The

When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for high-tech companies made sense, but my personal experience with training programs at the companies where I had worked was underwhelming. The courses were taught by outside firms who didn’t really understand our business and were teaching things that weren’t relevant. Then I read chapter 16 of Andy Grove’s management classic, High Output Management, titled “Why Training Is the Boss’s Job,” and it changed my career. Grove wrote, “Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.

As an audience it seems we’re as good as saying, “I’ll pay attention to your idea if you… * are already being taken seriously in some way * have found your place (professionally or personally) * believe strongly in something relevant to your idea * are connecting (with ideas, with people) in meaningful ways * are finding ways to be useful in the world * are finding ways to achieve more of what you value * have developed mastery and control * are participating in interesting things * and are radiating love and acceptance for self and others.” Your chosen audience will have three or four things on that list they value most in their own lives. And because they do value those things so highly, they’ll be looking for those signals from you.

Why is it that whatever we touch we turn into a problem? We have made God a problem, we have made love a problem, we have made relationship, living a problem, and we have made sex a problem. Why? Why is everything we do a problem, a horror? Why are we suffering? Why has sex become a problem? Why do we submit to living with problems, why do we not put an end to them? Why do we not die to our problems instead of carrying them day after day, year after year? Sex is certainly a relevant question but there is the primary question: why do we make life into a problem? Working, sex, earning money, thinking, feeling, experiencing—you know, the whole business of living—why is it a problem? Is it not essentially because we always think from a particular point of view, from a fixed point of view?

From the colonial era to the Trump era, the “They Keep Coming” immigration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonize immigrants and lobby for immigration restriction. It has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and exploitation. At the same time, it has promoted a false and incomplete narrative of how immigration works. No part of the myth is actually true. Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses. Only by fully understanding the origins, endurance, and contemporary relevance of the “They Keep Coming” myth can we begin to dismantle it and the xenophobia and racism that it fuels.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

We think that if we are busily rushing about and doing things, we cannot be suffering from sloth. And besides, violent activity seems to offer an escape from the horrors of sloth. So the other sins hasten to provide a cloak for sloth. Gluttony offers a whirl of dancing, dining, sports, and dashing very fast from place to place to gape at beauty spots, which, when we get to them, we defile with vulgarity and waste. Covetousness rakes us out of bed at an early hour in order that we may put pep and hustle into our business. Envy sets us to gossip and scandal, to writing cantankerous letters to the papers, and to the unearthing of secrets and scavenging of dustbins. Wrath provides (very ingeniously) the argument that the only fitting activity in a world so full of evildoers and demons is to curse loudly and incessantly: “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world”; while lust provides that round of dreary promiscuity that passes for bodily vigor. But these are all disguises for the empty heart and the empty brain and the empty soul of acedia.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

Two general questions are of vital importance here. They are inter-linked and to a large extent interdependent. The first is, what are the boundaries of legitimate disagreement among historians? The second is, how far do historians' interpretations depend on a selective reading of the evidence and where does selectivity end and bias begin? The answers to both are fundamental to the business of being a historian. Historians bring a whole variety of ideas, theories, even preconceptions to the evidence to help them frame the questions they want to ask of it and guide their selection of what they want to consult. But once they get to work on the documents, they have a duty to read the evidence as fully and fairly as they can. If it contradicts some of the assumptions they have brought to it, they have to jettison those assumptions...What a professional historian does is to take the whole of the source in question into account, and check it against other relevant sources to reach a reasoned conclusion that will withstand critical scrutiny by other historians who look at the same material... Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. From _Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial_, 250-251

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

Picture a group where people express their views vigorously and passionately, even arguing with one another. If the group performs well, participants might reasonably look back and say that open and forthright expressions of opinion were a key reason for success. They’ll say: We were honest, we didn’t hold back—and that’s why we did so well! We had a good process! But what if the group’s performance turned out to be poor? Now people might recall things differently. We argued and fought. We were dysfunctional. Next time we should follow a respectful and disciplined process. But now imagine a group where people are calm, polite, and respectful of one another. They speak quietly and in turn. If the group does well, participants might look back and credit their courteous and cooperative nature. We respected one another. We didn’t fight. We had a good process! But if the same group’s performance was poor, people might say: We were too polite. We censored ourselves. Next time, we should be more direct and open, not so concerned about one another’s feelings. The fact is, a wide variety of behaviors can lead to good decisions. There’s no precise way to engineer an “optimal” discussion process. We may try to avoid extremes, sure, but between those extremes is a wide range of behavior that might be conducive to success. And because we really don’t know what makes an optimal decision process, we tend to make attributions based on other things that are relevant and seemingly objective—namely, what we’re told about performance outcomes.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently. For example, how do you determine the price of bread in a free market? Well, every bakery may produce as much bread as it likes, and charge for it as much as it wants. The customers are equally free to buy as much bread as they can afford, or take their business to the competitor. It isn’t illegal to charge $1,000 for a baguette, but nobody is likely to buy it. On a much grander scale, if investors predict increased demand for bread, they will buy shares of biotech firms that genetically engineer more prolific wheat strains. The inflow of capital will enable the firms to speed up their research, thereby providing more wheat faster, and averting bread shortages. Even if one biotech giant adopts a flawed theory and reaches an impasse, its more successful competitors will achieve the hoped-for breakthrough. Free-market capitalism thus distributes the work of analysing data and making decisions between many independent but interconnected processors. As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

Sexual Excitation System (SES). This is the accelerator of your sexual response. It receives information about sexually relevant stimuli in the environment—things you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals from the brain to the genitals to tell them, “Turn on!” SES is constantly scanning your context (including your own thoughts and feelings) for things that are sexually relevant. It is always at work, far below the level of consciousness. You aren’t aware that it’s there until you find yourself turned on and pursuing sexual pleasure. Sexual Inhibition System (SIS). This is your sexual brake. “Inhibition” here doesn’t mean “shyness” but rather neurological “off” signals. Research has found that there are actually two brakes, reflecting the different functions of an inhibitory system. One brake works in much the same way as the accelerator. It notices all the potential threats in the environment—everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals saying, “Turn off!” It’s like the foot brake in a car, responding to stimuli in the moment. Just as the accelerator scans the environment for turn-ons, the brake scans for anything your brain interprets as a good reason not to be aroused right now—risk of STI transmission, unwanted pregnancy, social consequences, etc. And all day long it sends a steady stream of “Turn off!” messages. This brake is responsible for preventing us from getting inappropriately aroused in the middle of a business meeting or at dinner with our family. It’s also the system that throws the Off switch if, say, in the middle of some nookie, your grandmother walks in the room. The second brake is a little different. It’s more like the hand brake in a car, a chronic, low-level “No thank you” signal. If you try to drive with the hand brake on, you might be able to get where you want to go, but it’ll take longer and use a lot more gas. Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure,” like worry about not having an orgasm.

Let me pursue this point briefly with reference to what is described in our media, and by many of our public intellectuals, as “the Islamic roots of violence”—especially since September 2001. Religion has long been seen as a source of violence,10 and (for ideological reasons) Islam has been represented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singularly oppressive). Experts on “Islam,” “the modern world,” and “political philosophy” have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur‘an—or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafez al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an—nor did the secularist Saddam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not—so far as is publicly known—invoke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho.11 Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in some cases do so because that seems to them just—or else expedient. But that’s very different from saying that they are constrained to do so. One need only remind oneself of the banal fact that innumerable pious Muslims, Jews, and Christians read their scriptures without being seized by the need to kill non-believers. My point here is simply to emphasize that the way people engage with such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and traditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the perceived demands of particular social situations.

Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It’s estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were crucified, but this was far from the end of Rome’s problems with its slaves.               But new signs of distress appeared in this period that were far more relevant to our purpose here tonight. For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect that something fundamentally wrong was going on here. For the first time in history, people were beginning to feel empty, were beginning to feel that their lives were not amounting to enough, were beginning to wonder if this is all there is to life, were beginning to hanker after something vaguely more. For the first time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who promised them salvation.               It's impossible to overstate the novelty of this idea of salvation. Religion had been around in our culture for thousands of years, of course, but it had never been about salvation as we understand it or as the people of this period began to understand it. Earlier gods had been talismanic gods of kitchen and crop, mining and mist, house-painting and herding, stroked at need like lucky charms, and earlier religions had been state religions, part of the apparatus of sovereignty and governance (as is apparent from their temples, built for royal ceremonies, not for popular public devotions).               Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no existence before it. Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, wrong with them.

Trust is a good business practice.

Even if your company’s financial condition can withstand the inefficiency of quality service, your brand likely won’t.

From a nitty-gritty, practical standpoint, here is the drill that can get you there:   Loose Papers Pull out all miscellaneous scraps of paper, business cards, receipts, and so on that have crept into the crevices of your desk, clothing, and accessories. Put it all into your in-basket for processing.   Process Your Notes Review any journal entries, meeting notes, or miscellaneous notes scribbled on notebook paper. List action items, projects, waiting-fors, calendar events, and someday/ maybes, as appropriate. File any reference notes and materials. Stage your “Read/Review” material. Be ruthless with yourself, processing all notes and thoughts relative to interactions, projects, new initiatives, and input that have come your way since your last download, and purging those not needed.   Previous Calendar Data Review past calendar dates in detail for remaining action items, reference information, and so on, and transfer that data into the active system. Be able to archive your last week’s calendar with nothing left uncaptured.   Upcoming Calendar Look at future calendar events (long- and short-term). Capture actions about arrangements and preparations for any upcoming events.   Empty Your Head Put in writing (in appropriate categories) any new projects, action items, waiting-fors, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured.   Review “Projects” (and Larger Outcome) Lists Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that at least one current kick-start action for each is in your system.   Review “Next Actions” Lists Mark off completed actions. Review for reminders of further action steps to capture.   Review “Waiting For” List Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items.   Review Any Relevant Checklists Is there anything you haven’t done that you need to do?   Review “Someday/Maybe” List Check for any projects that may have become active and transfer them to “Projects.” Delete items no longer of interest.   Review “Pending” and Support Files Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.   Be Creative and Courageous Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to your system?

In 2012, GE unveiled its answer to these threats, a campaign it calls the “industrial Internet.” It included a new research lab across the bay from Silicon Valley, where it has hired 800 people, many of them programmers and data scientists. “People have told companies like GE for years that they can’t be in the software business,” Immelt said last year. “We’re too slow. We’re big and dopey. But you know what? We are extremely dedicated to winning in the markets we’re in. And this is a to-the-death fight to remain relevant to our customers.

We each carry with us unique gifts, recognized and unrecognized. We long to harness those gifts in a way that gives life significance and helps us to matter more in the lives of others.

The delightful part about digital is that if done right, it actually gets people to tell us who they are and what they’re looking for. Organizations can get an actual understanding of what their needs or aspirations are, enabling every business to be much more relevant in their engagement with customers. When that starts to happen, people get excited because you actually see the people you’re trying to reach and serve as they are. And it makes a huge difference. But for this to happen, the rate and pace of the adoption of digital for everyone has to happen quickly and in the right way to act on and harness this new power. Principally, most organizations have a skills and mindset gap with the amount of process change, tooling, and data that is being put into place. I’m convinced that the future of digital is going to change so many things. And we can’t wait. Most people are just as anxious as I am to get to that future.” —Jon Iwata, senior vice president, marketing and communications, IBM

Don’t separate scale from the rest of the evaluation. The relevant question isn’t whether an executive can scale; it’s whether the executive can do the job at the current scale.

Process definition requires more than a series of action steps; it needs clear documentation of the relevant whys and hows.

Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.

Remember, whether you’re selling a product or a service, you are in the customer experience business. Customer experience is not just a function of training your staff; it’s a design function. If you want to design something that’s going to succeed, it needs to deliver value to customers across each and every touchpoint. Innovation is as much a philosophy as it is a business discipline. The philosophy begins with a customer-centered view of the universe. A fractional approach will result in failure, and even worse, you will lose credibility. Don’t deploy on innovation until you really mean to carry it through, and when you do, make sure you do it right. When you launch innovation initiatives, build in dashboards

Fortunately, Google found product/ market fit by refining Overture’s advertising auction model. Google’s AdWords product was so much better at monetizing search through its self-service, relevance-driven, auction system that by the time those competitors managed to play catch-up, Google had amassed the financial resources that allowed it to invest whatever was necessary to maintain product superiority. Google doesn’t always get product/ market fit right (and if it had run out of money before hitting upon AdWords, the search business might have died before ever achieving that fit). This is a reflection of its very intentional product management philosophy, which relies on bottom-up innovation and a high tolerance for failure. When it works, as in Gmail, which was a bottom-up project launched by Paul Buchheit, it can produce killer products. But when it fails, it results in killed products, as demonstrated by projects like Buzz, Wave, and Glass. To overcome this risk of failure, Google relies on both its financial strength (which comes from its high gross margins, among other things) and a willingness to decisively cut its losses. For example, when Google bought YouTube (which had clearly achieved product/ market fit), it was willing to abandon its own Google Video service, even though it had invested heavily in that product. Other massively successful companies take a very different approach. In contrast to Google, where new ideas can come from anywhere in the company and there are always many parallel projects going on at the same time, Apple takes a top-down approach that puts more wood behind fewer arrows. Apple keeps its product lines small and tends to work on a single major product at a time. One philosophy isn’t necessarily better than the other; the important thing is simply to find that product/ market fit quickly, before your competition does.

Get Noticed In Cyber Space With SEO Do you own a website or blog and want to get the most out of it by increasing your traffic without spending a dime? Then you should look into the world of search engine optimization! Search engine optimization gets more people to your site for free. Read on to learn how you, too, can do this! When designing your site for SEO, make sure to include relevant keywords in the title tag. Since these words will show up as the title to your page, it is the single most important place to put the relevant keywords. However, make sure your title tag is no more than six to seven words in length. Using flash files is not a good idea for search engine optimization. Be aware of using flash as it can be very slow to load, and users will get frustrated. In addition, search engine spiders will not read keywords that are found in flash files. When marketing a product online, make sure your site is as useable and accessible as possible. If your website has problems with the code or can't be viewed by certain browsers, you will lose visitors and therefore sales. Very few people will go to the trouble of switching browsers just to use your site. When optimizing your website, be sure to optimize your description meta tag as well. Some experts believe that keyword meta tags are nearly worthless today, as search engines no longer use them, but that descriptions will usually show up under your page title on the results page, and they are also involved in the indexing process. With search engine optimization, your blog or website can get way more traffic by appearing early on lists of search results for terms related to your business. Apply these easy, free, and effective techniques to maximize your traffic and use that traffic to maximize your profits. Why wait? Start now! Use these tips for successful SEO of any business online and try visit holisticmade.com

When you try things for yourself, you innovate. You develop new ideas and figure out new service packages or agency processes. In our fast-paced world you need to be constantly innovating to stay relevant and not die like a dinosaur.

they could come in, change the business model, create connected electric cars, change the sales process, and change the way cars were manufactured. “That’s also bollocks,” Palmer concluded, steadily holding my gaze. “Complete bollocks.” “Why?” I asked. “Well, you can’t ignore a hundred and twenty-five years of history. The auto industry didn’t not learn anything.” When you put together a car, most of it is mechanical, and most of it is done by people who have spent a career working out how to do a suspension system, or a door lock, or a steering wheel, Palmer said. “And you can’t ignore that. So you’ve got to buy it. And you either buy it through a consultancy, or you buy it through recruitment, or you buy it through collaboration.” This spelled trouble for the newcomers. “The majority of those start-ups will fail because they’ll be too slow to recognize that they can’t just trash the auto industry, that there’s something relevant that they need.” So why was Jia Yueting different?

In startups the emphasis is on “get it done, and get it done fast.” So it’s natural that heads of Sales and Marketing believe they are hired for what they know, not what they can learn. They assume their prior experience is relevant in this new venture. They assume they understand the customer problem and therefore the product that needs to be built and sold. Therefore they need to put that knowledge to work and execute the product development, sales and marketing processes and programs that have worked for them before. This is usually a faulty assumption. Before we can build and sell a product, we have to answer some very basic questions: What are the problems our product solves? Do customers perceive these problems as important or “must-have”? If we’re selling to businesses, who in a company has a problem our product could solve? If we are selling to consumers how do we reach them? How big is this problem? Who do we make the first sales call on? Who else has to approve the purchase? How many customers do we need to be profitable? What’s the average order size?

The success of these projects and others like them is thanks to developers. The millions of programmers across the world who use, develop, improve, document, and rely upon open source are the main reason it’s relevant, and the main reason it continues to grow. In return for this support, open source has set those developers free from traditional procurement. Forever. Financial constraints that once served as a barrier to entry in software not only throttled the rate and pace of innovation in the industry, they ensured that organizational developers were a subservient class at best, a cost center at worst. With the rise of open source, however, developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses  —  only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift.