Roundtable Discussion Quotes

Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence.

I asked Dr. Davis if Just Us could have a roundtable discussion at Williamson like they do at Garden High. He said he didn’t see the need.

What can I say? Big pharma isn’t lying to you (fine, they probably are): performance-enhancing drugs deliver, babes. In the short term, at least. I felt so ambitious! I was bright-eyed and chatty at roundtable discussions

He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he's going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that's undemocratic.

As Frances had learned to do in times of uncertainty, she created a project over which she had total control and began writing a book “Dedicated to the memory of Irving Thalberg as a tribute to his vision and genius.” How to Write and Sell Film Stories was written for “serious students of film technique.” She filled the straightforward textbook with anecdotes from her films and others’ to convey the lessons on the development of plot, motivation, and characters she had learned with Thalberg. She had come to believe that because of increased censorship and the limited number of adaptable plays and novels, “eighty percent of the motion pictures produced will be soon be stories written exclusively for the screen” and the time was right for a book on original screenplays. The audience for the book was immediate; universities ordered copies before it was published and it quickly went into several printings. The book led to her taking on an advice column on screen writing for Cinema Progress, a serious educational film magazine published by the American Institute of Cinematography based at the University of Southern California. She opened her house to roundtable discussions with students and sponsored a scenario contest with the winners serving as studio “apprentices.

Just as the cops were annoyed when Ricky said he had been repeatedly stopped because he is black, discussion of race is often dismissed or talked over unless it is in a sanctioned space. You can talk about your experience at a roundtable on race, but don’t talk about yourself at a “regular” roundtable.

In 1981, the Business Roundtable wrote in its Statement on Corporate Responsibility that companies should always consider the effects their actions have on a number of groups including their shareholders, their communities, their employees, and society at large. But by 1997, their Statement on Corporate Governance discussed only how they could best serve their shareholders.” Employees, communities, and society at large were no longer a priority. Only shareholders were.

Now, of course, Netflix’s culture is famous. There’s a much-downloaded PowerPoint presentation given to all new employees. But the truth is, it wasn’t the product of meetings or careful planning or roundtable discussions. It arose organically, through a shared set of values among a team of people who had been through their fair share of offices—startups, major corporations, and everywhere in between. Netflix, for all of us, was an opportunity to work at the kind of place we’d always dreamed about. It was a chance to do things truly our way. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

SHAKE SHACK’S PHILOSOPHY RUNS DEEP Meyer believes that 49 percent of CX comes down to food, “which is more or less service.” But the other 51 percent is made up of thoughtful things you do—the customer service and enlightened guest hospitality. In other words, it’s people. To ensure Shake Shack stays on track, it uses real-time feedback (providing comment cards, roundtable discussions, and monthly dining vouchers for its staff) to deliver a consistent dining (customer) experience. Nothing is off-limits, and no detail is too small to consider improving. Shake

Most of the time, however, the capacity to have an internal dialogue (or roundtable discussion) with the various parts of ourselves is healthy and human. Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.” In that state of literal thoughtlessness (i.e., an absence of thoughts of one’s own), totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads—we should fear their absence.

If you have the opportunity to get formal training, take it. This might mean signing up for a company seminar, attending an industry conference, participating in a roundtable discussion, hearing experts on a panel, or engaging in a hands-on workshop. It might seem obvious that formal training is helpful, but it also rarely feels urgent or necessary. Besides costing time, it also tends to cost money, which means we engage in a classic back-and-forth with ourselves: Is it worth it? Especially in the middle of a hectic week, is it really a good idea to step away for a two-day workshop or to give up a relaxing evening at home for a lecture? The answer is usually yes. If spending ten hours being trained helps you be even 1 percent more efficient at your job, then it’s a good return on investment (1 percent of time saved per year is about twenty hours).

The comments these young men and women make at their roundtable discussions often betray the deep contradictions they contend with in their daily lives. They are disillusioned with the government but planning to serve it; critical of corrupt officials but unwilling to resist them; and intensely focused on the United States, a country they view as both Russia’s most dangerous adversary and its indispensable ally.