Supplier Quotes

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In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
He dunked his tea bag and watched the results critically. “I really must get a new supplier. This tea is pathetic. America just doesn’t understand tea at all.
Rachel Caine (The Dead Girls' Dance (The Morganville Vampires, #2))
We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.
Jimmy Carter
Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.
Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power)
Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.
Tyler Cowen (An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies)
Businesses are at all times and in different ways accountable to employees, suppliers, customers and community.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
I told her that I didn't want to take any drugs. That I had come here not to take drugs. "Listen," she said, not unkindly, "up until now I would say that ninety-nine percent of all the narcotics you have taken in your life you bought from guys you didn't know, in bathrooms or on street corners, something like that. Correct?" I nodded. "Well these guys could have been selling you salt or strychnine. They didn't care. They wanted your money. I don't care about your money, and, unlike your previous suppliers, I went to college to study just the right drugs to give to people like you in order to help you get better. So, bearing all that in mind ... Take the fucking drugs!" I took the drugs.
Craig Ferguson (American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot)
Criminals did not have friends. They had associates, suppliers, fences, whores, sugar daddies, enablers, dealers, collaborators, co-conspirators, victims and bosses, any of whom they might rat out and none of whom could be trusted.
Robert Crais (The Two Minute Rule)
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere. There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.' This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. (From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
A compassionate leader always feel motivated to bring happiness and relieve the suffering of customers, investors, suppliers, employees, government and the communities.
Amit Ray (Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management)
what sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight—new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.
Matthew Dixon (The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)
Have you heard the saying, 'sex sells'? Well, I'm the supplier.
Lyra Parish (Weak for Him (Weakness, #1))
I spent my day as I normally spend my days: threatening suppliers, bullying those who are not in line with my expectations, and generally creating havoc in the lives of others. The square across the street is empty of all but the pigeons. I find myself resenting them.
Courtney Milan (The Governess Affair (Brothers Sinister, #0.5))
I used to always worry about money and where it would come from, but now I know that God is the supplier and the giver of good gifts.
Jean Coleman (Chapter 29 Revisited)
The essence of Relationship Selling is when we convert a customer into a client and the seller gains the status of a supplier. It is really a process of forming a business partnership, where each partner not only transacts business but is interdependent in a mutually beneficial relationship, with a common growth objective. Sales can be:    B2B (Business to Business)  B2C (Business to Consumer)  Direct or indirect selling
Shiv Khera (You Can Sell: Results are Rewarded, Efforts Aren't)
I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield.
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
Some miners’ wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.
John McPhee (Assembling California (Annals of the Former World Book 4))
This is getting beyond a joke now. I have a long list of things that can’t be completed because some vital part is not available. It’s driving my Commanders crazy.” He glanced at Mary. “And they take it out on me!” The Admiral saw the grin. “Ah, I see, so now you want to take it out on me? No way, Captain Heron.” He laughed. “Security think there is something else going on here. None of the suppliers is reporting problems in manufacture, there’s no shortages reported in the raw materials, and there are no reports of any other problems—but they seem unable to meet a third of our requirements. Just enough that we can’t claim breaches of contract.
Patrick G. Cox (First into the Fray (Harry Heron #1.5))
the Coca-Cola Company is the biggest single supplier of such drinks. Globally, the company supplies 3 percent of humanity's total liquid intake.
Tom Standage (A History of the World in 6 Glasses)
The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
There's no such thing as "The One", she once said. They were at dinner in Taipei, with a supplier and his wife. The couple had been married forty years. The idea that there's just one person in the world you're meant to be with, it's illogical, she said. She'd had a few drinks and was enjoying her own loud thoughts. The math just doesn't work! Who you end up with, it's really just an accident of proximity.
Dave Eggers (A Hologram for the King)
Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
In dated Industrial models, products and services flowed linearly from suppliers to manufacturers to distributors to consumers. But in a permaculture economy model, people and businesses are involved in a value web whereby they may each hold more than one of those roles and each entities role is more hybridized. It’s about cyclical co-creation and cyclical co-consumption.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
He envisions the supply chain as an “intricate network of suppliers, distributors, and customers who share carefully managed information about demand, decisions, and performance, and who recognize that success for one part of the supply chain means success for all.
Michael H. Hugos (Essentials of Supply Chain Management (Essentials Series Book 62))
But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
Line up some “multidimensional” support. When it’s nose-to-the-grindstone time, we tend to get the grindstone kind of people on board—suppliers, designers, editors, marketers, “work/task” people. But this is precisely the time when you need some spiritually informed intelligence to back you up: a naturopath, a trainer, green smoothies, a prayer group. All that woo-woo love and insight will go a long way in helping you navigate the heavy-duty logistics on a daily basis.
Danielle LaPorte (The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms)
My appreciation of the power of hospitality and my desire to harness it have been the greatest contributors to whatever success my restaurants and businesses have had. I’ve learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business—in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities “enlightened hospitality.” It stands some more traditional business approaches on their head, but it’s the foundation of every business decision and every success we’ve had.
Danny Meyer
A Philippine-brothel-owning member of the House of Lords was staying at the house of a Spanish Chief Inspector of Police. The Lord was being watched by an American CIA operative who was staying at the house of an English convicted sex offender. The CIA operative was sharing accommodation with an IRA terrorist. The IRA terrorist was discussing a Moroccan hashish deal with a Georgian pilot of Colombia's Medellín Cartel. Organising these scenarios was an ex-MI6 agent, currently supervising the sale of thirty tons of Thai weed in Canada and at whose house could be found Pakistan's major supplier of hashish. Attempting to understand the scenarios was a solitary DEA agent. The stage was set for something.
Howard Marks (Mr. Nice)
There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.
Matthew Dixon (The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)
He picks the most visible place on purpose,” said the investor and Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson. “He’s at Tesla just about every Saturday and Sunday and wants people to see him and know they can find him. Then, he can also call suppliers on the weekend, and let them know that he’s personally putting in the hours on the factory floor and expects the same from them.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
But the more the Tesla guys researched the industry, the more they realized that the big automakers don’t even really build their cars anymore. The days of Henry Ford having raw materials delivered to one end of his Michigan factory and then sending cars out the other end had long passed. “BMW didn’t make its windshields or upholstery or rearview mirrors,” Tarpenning said. “The only thing the big car companies had kept was internal combustion research, sales and marketing, and the final assembly. We thought naïvely that we could access all the same suppliers for our parts.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
Regardless of whether you’re trying to convince someone to support your favorite charity, eat healthier, switch their business from their current supplier to your firm, or just adopt a new way of working at the office, one of the most common explanations for lack of persuasive success is also one of the simplest: People recognize they should change their behavior, but they just don’t feel like doing it right now.
Steve J. Martin (The small BIG: small changes that spark big influence)
Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, “There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.
David Halberstam (The Reckoning)
I leaned back into my chair, folded my arms together and made like I was pondering. ‘I understand. You’re worried about the future.’ ‘Damn right.’ ‘Let me tell you something about the future – it isn’t the present. And in the present I’m guaranteeing you that there’s nothing that your supplier will do to you tomorrow that I won’t do to you today, now, right this very moment. Might as well postpone getting dead. When you think about it, isn’t that all we’re ever doing?
Daniel Polansky (She Who Waits (Low Town Book 3))
This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Un piège. Dressé non pour Ellana mais pour lui. Jilano bondit vers la porte. Verrouillée, elle l'aurait à peine ralenti. Elle s'ouvrit sans difficulté. Sur un mur de pierre. Il leva les yeux. La même substance huileuse qui l'avait fait glisser recouvrait tous les murs. La gouttière gisait au sol. Inutile de l'observer pour savoir qu'elle avait été sabotée. Du joli travail. Jilano inspira profondément, ralentissant son rythme cardiaque jusqu'à ce que son corps élimine l'injonction de survie induite par le danger. Ce n'était plus la peine. Il s'assit en tailleur contre un mur et attendit que la silhouette apparaisse au-dessus de lui. Elle ne tarda pas. Un sourire pâle erra sur les lèvres du maître marchombre lorsqu’il reconnut l'assassin. La guilde était donc tombée si bas ? Il faillit parler, non pas pour tenter de convaincre, encore moins pour supplier, mais pour chercher à comprendre. Il préféra détourner les yeux afin de se concentrer sur l'essentiel. Alors que l'assassin bandait son arc, les pensées de Jilano s'envolèrent vers Ellana. Bonheur. Gratitude. Amour. - Garde-toi, murmura-t-il, et que ta route soit belle. - Madame ! Que vous arrive-t-il ? Ellana était brusquement devenue livide. Elle poussa un cri rauque, leva la main à son cœur et, avant qu'Aoro ait pu intervenir, elle s'effondra.
Pierre Bottero (Ellana, l'Envol (Le Pacte des MarchOmbres, #2))
The theory they used to prevent women voting was that the female brain could not comprehend the complexity of politics. Politics was for men. Child-bearing was for women. And the best supplier of reasons for keeping people in their place has always been religion. We saw it at work in the debate over slavery. The Bible and the Qur’an both took slavery for granted. They took the subordination of women for granted too. So we run up against the awkward fact that sacred texts can be used to supply ammunition for those who want to keep people under control.
Richard Holloway (A Little History of Religion)
She had pronounced the words “New Books” with caution and regret, articulating them reluctantly, as if they were vulgar, even obscene words. As I listened to her, I realised that that it was indeed a commercial term, used to designate an item in fashion, but inappropriate to define a literary work; I also realised that to her eyes I was nothing but an author of ‘New Books’ a supplier in a way. “But novels by Daudet or Maupassant - weren’t they ‘New Books’ when they came out?” I asked. “Time has given them their place”, she replied, as though I had just said something insolent.
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (La rêveuse d'Ostende)
In this chapter I will describe the effects of the data deluge on all members of society generally and how it erodes the confidence, judgment, and decisiveness of leaders in particular. Then I will show the paradoxical side of the data deluge. Despite its anxiety-provoking effects, the proliferation of data also has an addictive quality. Leaders, healers, and parents “imbibe” data as a way of dealing with their own chronic anxiety. The pursuit of data, in almost any field, has come to resemble a form of substance abuse, accompanied by all the usual problems of addiction: self-doubt, denial, temptation, relapse, and withdrawal. Leadership training programs thus wind up in the codependent position of enablers, with publishers often in the role of “suppliers.” What does it take to get parents, healers, and managers, when they hear of the latest quick-fix fad that has just been published, to “just say no”?
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
Dealing With Genuine Gurkha Knife - New official Khukuri (kukri) supplier of the British Gurkha Army. Welcome to Ex Gurkha Khukuri House, The first Kukri Gurkha Kukri Knife - The Khukuri(gurkha knife),a semi-curve metal knife,is synonymous with the valor of legendary Gurkha soldiers.Though Kukri is national
Gurkha
Elle le regarda enfourcher son vélo et filer vers le carrefour. Elle pensa mon Dieu il faut que je le rappelle. Vite. Puis elle pensa s'il croit que je vais le supplier! Puis oh mon Dieu si ça se trouve c'est la dernière fois que je le vois! - Salut, murmura-t-elle. Le vélo avait disparu depuis une bonne minute.
Malika Ferdjoukh (Hortense (Quatre soeurs, #2))
Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. For relatively smallscale trade, grain dealers could transact with several suppliers as long as they knew the measure each was using. They might actually profit from their superior grasp of the profusion of units, much as smugglers take advantage of small differences in taxes and tariffs. Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures.
James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks))
Over the past twenty years, Maher watched that pattern play out again and again as major clothing brands made demands on suppliers in Bangladesh to lower their prices while also completing orders faster and constantly improving their workplace and environmental standards. Fakir Fashion has implemented certified projects to treat its wastewater, harvest rainwater, use more solar power, provide meals and child care for workers, hire workers with disabilities, build schools in the local area and more. They have been unable to pass on any of the expenses of these improvements to apparel brands or consumers, who continue to want more for less.
J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the ‘many issues with women’s voices’.26 What women need, he said, was ‘lengthy training’ – if only women ‘were willing’ to submit to it. Which, sighs Schalk, they just aren’t. Just like the wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it’s obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
However, even before the orgies of neoliberalism it was obvious that capitalism is not socially efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially useful science to the existence of public education and public transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had capitalism foisted on them.3 All this testifies to a “market failure,” or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-capital and every other4—and which is propelled by the structural necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard neoclassical economics, which makes such assumptions as perfect knowledge, perfect capital and labor flexibility, the absence of firms with “market power,” the absence of government, and in general the myth of homo economicus—the person susceptible of no other considerations than those of pure “economic rationality”—is societal harmony going to result.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Recently, as I was teaching this concept, a CFO—who deals with numbers all the time—came up to me and said, “This is fascinating! I’ve always seen trust as a nice thing to have, but I never, ever, thought of it in terms of its impact on economics and speed. Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can see it everywhere I turn. “For example, we have one supplier in whom we have complete trust. Everything happens fast with this group, and the relationship hardly costs us anything to maintain. But with another supplier, we have very little trust. It takes forever to get anything done, and it costs us a lot of time and effort to support the relationship. And that’s costing us money—too much money!” This CFO was amazed when everything suddenly fell into place in his mind. Even though he was a “numbers” guy, he had not connected the dots with regard to trust. Once he saw it, everything suddenly made sense. He could immediately see how trust was affecting everything in the organization, and how robust and powerful the idea of the relationship between trust, speed, and cost was for analyzing what was happening in his business and for taking steps to significantly increase profitable growth.
Stephen M.R. Covey (The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything)
President Carter’s re-election campaign in 1979 commenced amid spiralling global oil prices. With Bandar’s help, Carter drafted a letter to Fahd requesting Saudi Arabia to put more oil on the market.69 Fahd responded: ‘Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.’70 He promised to do ‘anything in his power externally or internally to ensure your re-election’, since this was ‘essential if there was ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’.71 This assistance, which saw Saudi oil trading $4–5 a day below other suppliers, cost the kingdom $30m to $40m a day. In gratitude, Carter invited Bandar to the White House in early December 1979, where they discussed Middle East politics and the US–Saudi relationship.
Andrew Feinstein (The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade)
Mass production was aimed at new sources of demand in the early twentieth century’s first mass consumers. Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”73 Supply and demand were linked effects of the new “conditions of existence” that defined the lives of my great-grandparents Sophie and Max and other travelers in the first modernity. Ford’s invention deepened the reciprocities between capitalism and these populations. In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. Reinvestment in user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
The shareholders who own the businesses in this book have other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they don’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it’s not their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They’re also interested in being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they live and work in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’ve learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they have to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grow. The wealth they’ve created, though substantial, has been a byproduct of success in these other areas. I call them small giants.
Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big)
Overnight, however, he apparently had second thoughts, or did some textbook reading on his own, and at the next meeting he turned to me as the first order of business. “On the black paint,” he said, “you were right about the advantages and I was wrong.” He handed me a quarter. It was a rare win. So Kelly approved my idea of painting the airplane black, and by the time our first prototype rolled out the airplane became known as the Blackbird. Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters—the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.
Ben R. Rich (Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed)
In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.
Jesse Eisinger (The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives)
great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
Il y a quelqu'un que je n'ai encore jamais eu envie de tuer. C'est toi. Tu peux marcher dans les rues, tu peux boire et marcher dans les rues, je ne te tuerai pas. N'aie pas peur. La ville est sans danger. Le seul danger dans la ville, c'est moi. Je marche, je marche dans les rues, je tue. Mais toi, tu n'as rien à craindre. Si je te suis, c'est parce que j'aime le rythme de tes pas. Tu titubes. C'est beau. On pourrait dire que tu boites. Et que tu es bossu. Tu ne l'es pas vraiment. De temps en temps tu te redresses, et tu marches droit. Mais moi, je t'aime dans les heures avancées de la nuit, quand tu es faible, quand tu trébuches, quand tu te voûtes. Je te suis, tu trembles. De froid ou de peur. Il fait chaud pourtant. Jamais, presque jamais, peut-être jamais il n'avait fait si chaud dans notre ville. Et de quoi pourrais-tu avoir peur? De moi? Je ne suis pas ton ennemi. Je t'aime. Et personne d'autre ne pourrait te faire du mal. N'aie pas peur. je suis là. Je te protège. Pourtant, je souffre aussi. Mes larmes - grosses gouttes de pluie - me coulent sur le visage. La nuit me voile. La lune m'éclaire. Les nuages me cachent. Le vent me déchire. J'ai une sorte de tendresse pour toi. Cela m'arrive parfois. Tres rarement. Pourquoi pour toi? Je n'en sais rien. Je veux te suivre très loin, partout, longtemps. Je veux te voir souffrir encore plus. Je veux que tu en aies assez de tout le reste. Je veux que tu viennes me supplier de te prendre. Je veux que tu me désires. Que tu aies envie de moi, que tu m'aimes, que tu m'appelles. Alors, je te prendrai dans mes bras, je te serrerai sur mon coeur, tu seras mon enfant, mon amant, mon amour. Je t'emporterai. Tu avais peur de naître, et maintenant tu as peur de mourir. Tu as peur de tout. Il ne faut pas avoir peur. Il y a simplement une grande roue qui tourne. Elle s'appelle Éternité. C'est moi qui fais tourner la grande roue. Tu ne dois pas avoir peur de moi. Ni de la grande roue. La seule chose qui puisse faire peur, qui puisse faire mal, c'est la vie, et tu la connais déjà.
Ágota Kristóf
Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
Unconditional blame is the tendency to explain all difficulties exclusively as the consequence of forces beyond your influence, to see yourself as an absolute victim of external circumstances. Every person suffers the impact of factors beyond his control, so we are all, in a sense, victims. We are not, however, absolute victims. We have the ability to respond to our circumstances and influence how they affect us. In contrast, the unconditional blamer defines his victim-identity by his helplessness, disowning any power to manage his life and assigning causality only to that which is beyond his control. Unconditional blamers believe that their problems are always someone else’s fault, and that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent them. Consequently, they believe that there’s nothing they should do to address them. Unconditional blamers feel innocent, unfairly burdened by others who do things they “shouldn’t” do because of maliciousness or stupidity. According to the unconditional blamer, these others “ought” to fix the problems they created. Blamers live in a state of self-righteous indignation, trying to control people around them with their accusations and angry demands. What the unconditional blamer does not see is that in order to claim innocence, he has to relinquish his power. If he is not part of the problem, he cannot be part of the solution. In fact, rather than being the main character of his life, the blamer is a spectator. Watching his own suffering from the sidelines, he feels “safe” because his misery is always somebody else’s fault. Blame is a tranquilizer. It soothes the blamer, sheltering him from accountability for his life. But like any drug, its soothing effect quickly turns sour, miring him in resignation and resentment. In order to avoid anxiety and guilt, the blamer must disown his freedom and power and see himself as a plaything of others. The blamer feels victimized at work. His job is fraught with letdowns, betrayals, disappointments, and resentments. He feels that he is expected to fix problems he didn’t create, yet his efforts are never recognized. So he shields himself with justifications. Breakdowns are never his fault, nor are solutions his responsibility. He is not accountable because it is always other people who failed to do what they should have done. Managers don’t give him direction as they should, employees don’t support him as they should, colleagues don’t cooperate with him as they should, customers demand much more than they should, suppliers don’t respond as they should, senior executives don’t lead the organization as they should, administration systems don’t work as they should—the whole company is a mess. In addition, the economy is weak, the job market tough, the taxes confiscatory, the regulations crippling, the interest rates exorbitant, and the competition fierce (especially because of those evil foreigners who pay unfairly low wages). And if it weren’t difficult enough to survive in this environment, everybody demands extraordinary results. The blamer never tires of reciting his tune, “Life is not fair!
Fred Kofman (Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values)
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Stain Peter