Resource Allocation Quotes

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

The board, in collaboration with management, crafts a strategic roadmap that defines the specific steps required to achieve the vision. This roadmap translates the company's "why" and "when" into a practical "how," outlining key milestones, resource allocation, and performance metrics.

In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.

Once risks are identified, they must be assessed in terms of their likelihood and potential impact. This allows the company to prioritize risks and allocate resources accordingly.

I believe that companies, as major employers, resource managers, technological innovators, and capital allocators, have a unique responsibility to operate with integrity, transparency, and accountability.

In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

In a permaculture economy, all capital is productive capital and all resources are efficiently utilized.

TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis, is for lack of a better term, us.

Every tree in every forest is participating in investment activities….. capital allocation, energy flow, resourcefulness, utilization, leverage, information distribution, growth, value creation, and ROI…. Nature is an economy, and every tree is an investor in that economy. Sometimes I just sit in my back yard, observe, and take notes.

The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.

Nature's efficiency in resource allocation is a lesson to businesses on optimizing operations and minimizing waste.

70/20/10 became our rule for resource allocation: 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.

No group can survive, let alone thrive, unless what is good for the overall community is more important than individual freedom. Take, for example, resource allocation. How can anyone with any intelligence possibly justify, in terms of the overall community, the accumulation and hoarding of enormous material assets by a few individuals when others do not even have food, clothing, and other essentials?” In

Companies should understand their cost structure to make informed decisions, optimize operations, and enhance profitability. This knowledge enables them to identify areas for cost reduction, pricing strategies, and resource allocation, ultimately contributing to financial sustainability and competitiveness.

The elementary and basic approach that I suggest places “the theory of markets” and not the “theory of resource allocation” at center stage. My plea is really for the adoption of a sophisticated “catallactics,”…

Just as price fluctuations allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses, price controls which limit those fluctuations reduce the incentives for individuals to limit their own use of scarce resources desired by others.

Capital allocation is about getting resources where they need to be so that they can have the opportunity to be productive. If capital isn't wisely allocated, it can't be productive. And if capital isn't productive, civilization collapses.

The allocation of research money was a political act.

When we talk about capital allocation, we're talking about all kinds of capital - financial capital, social capital, biological capital, human capital, intellectual capital, etc. Capital just means resources, or things capable of producing value.

To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

A Holistic Wealth perspective emphasizes creating budgets with purpose. Identify priorities, allocate resources and leave room for personal enjoyment. This approach fosters a healthy financial mindset, reducing the liklihood of regretting spending decisions.

Companies should manage tax liabilities strategically to optimize financial resources, enhance profitability, and ensure compliance with tax laws. Effective tax management reduces the tax burden and allows companies to allocate more resources to core activities, ultimately improving their bottom line.

stronger education leads to stronger technological innovation, which leads to increased productivity and increased shares of trade, greater wealth, more military power, and eventually the establishment of a reserve currency. Further, having strong leaders, a population that is well-educated and civil with each other, a system that efficiently allocates capital and other resources, access to natural resources, and favorable geography all help a lot, and when they decline, they tend to decline together.

Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission.

Let’s see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes…” “Tell me,” she said, “did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?” “Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean.

By measuring risk, we can develop coping skills, challenge our abilities, increase our strength, and allocate resources prudently. In essence, life is one constant series of risk calculations as we determine what we will do.

Companies should seek opportunities for cost reduction to improve efficiency, increase profitability, and maintain a competitive edge. Cost reduction efforts can lead to better financial health, enhanced competitiveness, and the ability to allocate resources to other critical areas of the business, fostering long-term growth and sustainability.

Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!

Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don’t give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don’t be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don’t allow yourself to burn out. I

The role of soil in natural ecosystems shares striking similarities with the role of capital in economies. Just as soil serves as the vital resource underpinning natural ecosystems, capital is the foundational resource driving economic systems. In both contexts, the effective allocation of resources, whether capital or nutrients, determines productivity, competitiveness, and overall stability.

Without a clear purpose you have no foundation on which you base decisions, allocate your time, and use your resources. You will tend to make choices based on circumstances, pressures, and your mood at that moment. People who don’t know their purpose try to do too much — and that causes stress, fatigue, and conflict.

Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God. You have limited amounts of gifting, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm, but unlimited ways of allocating them. For this reason productivity involves making decisions about how to allocate these finite resources.

Twelve chapters later, I’ve learned how our brains control many aspects of our physiology, including the tools that the body has available—from hormones and natural painkillers to the weapons of the immune system—to ease symptoms and fight disease. Instead of responding purely to physical circumstances, I’ve seen how the brain uses our perception of our environment, including memories of the past and predictions about the future, to decide how best to allocate its resources. These processes can have an effect within seconds, or they can influence our physiology for years to come.

Political bodies endlessly debate the pros and cons of every action that will improve the lives of the weak and the oppressed. The resulting legislation is usually a watered down version of charitable actions directed at uplifting the poor. Any government invariably tailors its allocation of resources and alignment of power to protect the pocketbooks of the wealthy and powerful. Consequently, the true benefactors of any government’s socioeconomic programs are prominent people and rich corporations. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Climate change portends a revolution in the relationship between nature and civilization, but this is not a revolution in the more efficient allocation of global resources in the program of endless growth. It is a revolution of love. It is to know the forests as sacred again, and the mangroves and the rivers, the mountains and the reefs, each and every one. It is to love them for their own beingness, and not merely to protect them because of their climate benefits.

Most of the institutions that come in to offer help after disaster don't have the resources to provide concrete help. . . . Donor communities invest billions funding peace talks and disarmament. Then they stop. The most important part of postwar help is missing: providing basic social services to people. Not having those resources might have been a reason men went to war in the first place; they crossed a border and joined an armed group because they didn't have jobs. In Liberia right now, there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, and they're ready-made mercenaries for wars in West Africa. You'd think the international community would be sensible enough to know they should work to change this. But they aren't.

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy. All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy.

Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!” “Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.” “Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?” “Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.” (...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?” “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself. “You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.

In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”…. Here is a way to frame the investments that we make in the strategy that becomes our lives: we have resources – which include personal time, energy, talent and wealth – and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives… How should we devote our resources to these pursuits? Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation process will decide investments for you according to the “default” criteria that essentially are wired into your brain and your heart. As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process –and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize. But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices. If you have an extra ounce of energy or a spare 30 minutes, there are a lot of people pushing you to spend them here rather than there. With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course… The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments… How you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

The transformation of a business-as-usual culture into one focused on innovation and driven by design involves activities, decisions, and attitudes. Workshops help expose people to design thinking as a new approach. Pilot projects help market the benefits of design thinking within the organization. Leadership focuses the program of change and gives people permission to learn and experiment. Assembling interdisciplinary teams ensures that the effort is broadly based. Dedicated spaces such as the P&G Innovation Gym provide a resource for longer-term thinking and ensure that the effort will be sustained. Measurement of impacts, both quantitative and qualitative, helps make the business case and ensures that resources are appropriately allocated. It may make sense to establish incentives for business units to collaborate in new ways so that younger talent sees innovation as a path to success rather than as a career risk.

We have commoditized wellness & creativity, and so gay men are up against these much larger contexts that aren't particularly conducive to the strongest, healthiest, most holistic approaches. Access to basic healthcare, and a healthcare system that is not homophobic and that is responsive to the needs of gay men, would radically change the pressures and therefore the opoprtunities for those of us who work primarily within the HIV/AIDS sector of healthcare, whether in research, programming and cultural production, or advocacy. Similarly with the arts: if we had sufficient and adequate funding for community-based arts programming--of all kinds, not just related to gay men and HIV--then it wouldn't seem so shocking and misappropriated to allocate some of those funds for gay men to tell their stories. So it's in this larger, structural context that we gt forced into very painful conversations about prioritizing of funding, or what's most important, and it's always a reductive conversation because of limited resources. --Patrick "Pato" Hebert

study of thirty thousand elderly people in fifty-two countries found that switching to an overall healthy lifestyle—eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately, and not drinking too much alcohol—lowered heart disease rates by approximately 50 percent.14 Reducing exposure to carcinogens, such as tobacco and sodium nitrite, have been shown to decrease the incidence of lung and stomach cancers, and it is likely (more evidence is needed) that lowering exposures to other known carcinogens, such as benzene and formaldehyde, will reduce the incidence of other cancers. Prevention really is the most powerful medicine, but we as a species consistently lack the political or psychological will to act preventively in our own best interests. It is worthwhile to ask to what extent efforts to treat the symptoms of common mismatch diseases have the effect of promoting dysevolution by taking attention and resources away from prevention. On an individual level, am I more likely to eat unhealthy foods and exercise insufficiently if I know I’ll have access to medical care to treat the symptoms of the diseases these choices cause many years later? More broadly within our society, is the money we allocate to treating diseases coming at the expense of money to prevent them?

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

Groupies and hangers-on somehow fancy themselves entitled to the narcissist’s favour and largesse, his time, attention, and other resources. They convince themselves that they are exempt from the narcissist’s rage and wrath and immune to his vagaries andabuse . This self-imputed and self-conferred status irritates the narcissist no end as it challenges and encroaches on his standing as the only source of preferential treatment and the sole decision-maker when it comes to the allocation of his precious and cosmically significant wherewithal. The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock: his spouse, his offspring, other family  members, friends, and colleagues. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished he is in reality – the more stringent his mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing. Cult leaders are narcissists who failed in their mission to "be someone", to become famous, and to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits, and skills. Such disgruntled narcissists withdraw into a "zone of comfort" (known as the "Pathological Narcissistic Space") that assumes the hallmarks of a cult. The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist's mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on them an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, "enemies", mythical-grandiose narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. Exclusionary shared psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his “flock” (spouse, children, fans, friends) from the outside world in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary shared psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist’s message in a missionary fashion among friends, colleagues, co-workers, fans, churchgoers, and anyone else who comes across the mini-cult. The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambientabuse . His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples and alters them at will.

More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

But as Bill Gates said to us when Mark and I met with him in his Seattle-area office, “People invest in high-probability scenarios: the markets that are there. And these low-probability things that maybe you should buy an insurance policy for by investing in capacity up front, don’t get done. Society allocates resources primarily in this capitalistic way. The irony is that there’s really no reward for being the one who anticipates the challenge.” Every time there is a new, serious viral outbreak, such as Ebola in 2012 and Zika in 2016, there is a public outcry, a demand to know why a vaccine wasn’t available to combat this latest threat. Next a public health official predicts a vaccine will be available in x number of months. These predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. And even if they’re right, there are problems in getting the vaccine production scaled up to meet the size and location of the threat, or the virus has receded to where it came from and there is no longer a demand for prevention or treatment. Here is Bill Gates again: Unfortunately, the message from the private sector has been quite negative, like H1N1 [the 2009 epidemic influenza strain]: A lot of vaccine was procured because people thought it would spread. Then, after it was all over, they sort of persecuted the WHO people and claimed GSK [GlaxoSmithKline] sold this stuff and they should have known the thing would end and it was a waste of money. That was bad. Even with Ebola, these guys—Merck, GSK, and J & J [Johnson & Johnson]—all spent a bunch of money and it’s not clear they won’t have wasted their money. They’re not break-even at this stage for the things they went and did, even though at the time everyone was saying, “Of course you’ll get paid. Just go and do all this stuff.” So it does attenuate the responsiveness. This model will never work or serve our worldwide needs. Yet if we don’t change the model, the outcome will not change, either.