“ God may have given [women] 50,000 words per day and her husband only 25,000. He comes home from work with 24,795 used up and merely grunts his way through the evening. He may descend into Monday night football while his wife is dying to expend her remaining 25,000 words. ” (page 58)

“ I... heard James Dobson compare life to a Monopoly game. We work hard to accumulate things so we can impress people who will probably resent us anyway. Then one day it's all over, we give it all back, and someone puts us in a box and closes the lid. Suddenly the dollar bills, deeds, and hotels don't matter. What matters is whether or not we pursued righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. What matters is whether or not we are ready to face God. ” (page 89)

“ The fact that something is a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity' is irrelevant... A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. ” (page 143)

“ At what point does the legitimate desire to protect become a repressive system of abuse? ” (location 912)

“ When we make faith more about us than Jesus, religion goes bad. ” (location 3794)

“ When it comes to collisions between paradigms and empirical reality, the latter usually loses ” (location 178)

“ Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter, even though the latter are required as carriers. ” (location 426)

“ Matter and energy are basic prerequisites for life, but they cannot be used to distinguish between living and inanimate systems. The central characteristic of all living beings is the "information" they contain, and this information regulates all life processes and procreative functions. Transfer of information plays a fundamental role in all living organisms. ” (location 835)

“ There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter. ” (location 1026)

“ We are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We're exquisitely sensitive to them. ” (location 1833)

“ What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning... something the rest of us can understand. ” (location 2609)

“ Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. ” (location 2971)

“ In the first two seconds of looking-in a single glance-they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the [museum] was able to understand after fourteen months. ” (location 192)

“ With a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn't impair their ability to come up with the answers. In some cases, in fact, it may help. But problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules. ” (location 1594)

“ The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter. ” (location 3316)

“ Sometimes we can make better judgments with less information. ” (location 3452)

“ Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. ” (location 974)

“ The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence" [and] includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect..." It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. ” (location 1256)

“ The consumer turns to the company and says, 'Give me more for less.' And then companies turn to employees and say, 'If we don't give them more for less, we are in trouble. I can't guarantee you a job and a union steward can't guarantee you a job, only a customer can.' ” (location 4424)

“ [IBM discovered that] an extraordinary company could only be built on a critical mass of extraordinary people. ” (location 6628)

“ The [new] job of government and business is not to guarantee anyone a lifetime job-those days are over. That social contract has been ripped up with the flattening of the world. What government can and must guarantee people is the chance to make themselves more employable. ” (location 6630)

“ The jobs are going to go where the best-educated workforce is with the most competitive infrastructure and environment for creativity and supportive government. It is inevitable. And by definition those people will have the best standard of living. This may or may not be the countries who led the Industrial Revolution. ” (location 7252)

“ The fact that technology allows us to access, create, and receive more and more information doesn't mean that our minds can absorb it all. Moore's Law applies to microchips, but not to the human brain. Our capacity to process and analyze information doesn't double every twenty-four months. ” (location 8884)

“ 'We are not running an exchange-we are running a community.' Indeed, with 105 million registered users from 190 countries trading more than $35 billion in products annually, eBay is actually a self-governing nation-state-the V.R.e., the Virtual Republic of eBay. And how is it governed? The philosophy of eBay, said [Meg] Whitman, [CEO,] is 'Let's make a small number of rules, really enforce them, and then create an environment in which people can fulfill their own potential.' ” (location 10568)

“ Collectivism is the rule in our world, and individualism the exception. ” (location 853)

“ Where there is ignorance, fantasy reigns. ” (location 1393)

“ In weak uncertainty avoidance cultures, like the USA and even more in the UK and, for example, Sweden, managers and nonmanagers alike feel definitely uncomfortable with systems of rigid rules, especially if it is evident that many of these are never followed. In strong uncertainty avoidance cultures, like most of the Latin world, people feel equally uncomfortable without the structure of a system of rules, even if many of these are impractical and impracticable. At either pole of the uncertainty avoidance dimension people's feelings are fed by deep psychological needs, related to the control of aggression and to basic security in the face of the unknown. ” (location 2156)

“ The Western concern with Truth is supported by an axiom in Western logic that a statement excludes its opposite: if A is true, B, which is the opposite of A, must be false. Eastern logic does not have such an axiom. If A is true, its opposite B may also be true, and together they produce a wisdom which is superior to either A or B. ” (location 2524)

“ What is good or bad depends in each case on where one wants the organization to go, and a cultural feature that is an asset for one purpose is unavoidably a liability for another. ” (location 2878)

“ It is dangerous to assume one knows one's organization's present cultural map and how it should be changed. Organizations can look very different from the top than from the middle or bottom where the actual work is done. ” (location 2894)

“ We all want technology to work like buildings and machinery. Cathedrals and bridges (even with moving parts) might work as designed very well for a very a long time. We assume technology should be the same way: once implemented it should just work. But technology isn't a discrete thing, it's a combination of individual components that are constantly being modified to suit the similarly changing needs of the business and to exploit the potential of new capabilities. Something else people work on experiences perpetual change: gardens. Gardens are not fixed in time. There are too many influences, too many factors that can change and impact its state. Not only are its individual components in a constant state of growth (or, indeed, death) but each component can also impact everything else. Also, seasonal effects stimulate their own cycles of new growth. Technology components are not plants: we have not yet invented self-building robots or self-modifying code. However, it is the gardening state of mind that is needed today. ”

“ to discipline or correct poor behavior, it is better to bring the child in closer, instead of pushing him away or rejecting him. ” (location 496)

“ If there is anything we've got to teach them, it is "trust us; we'll be there for you." ” (location 542)

“ On a night while you ate steak and fresh vegetables, safe in your comfortable house and enjoying warm conversation with your family, this child might have gone to bed hungry, dirty, and lonely, even rummaging in garbage cans for food. ” (location 770)

“ Children feel safest with adults who are kind but firm leaders. If a parent is indecisive and lets the child run the show, that's stressful to the youngster. He gets the unspoken message that he is on his own and has to fend for himself - after all, if his parents can't even control a little kid like him, they are bound to be ineffective in a crisis. Parents need to calmly demonstrate that they can handle whatever comes up. ” (location 1203)

“ The behavioral re-do and physical practice are critical components of this process ” (location 1784)

“ it is important to talk through his part of the compromise. ” (location 2358)

“ Reassure your child that everyone has feelings and it's good to express them - as long as it's done with respect. You can tell your child, "It's always okay to say how you feel with respect. So you can say, 'I feel angry about that rule' or 'I feel sad about not having somebody over when my brother does,' and you'll never be in trouble for saying those words - if you say them with respect." ” (location 2810)

“ The old phrase "knowledge is power" is not quite correct. Understanding is power ” (location 64)

“ Geeks are the knowledge workers who specialize in the creation, maintenance, or support of high technology. ” (location 149)

“ Geekwork is less about behavior and more about thought, ideas, and the application of creativity. In more traditional forms of work, controlling employee behavior is the primary point of management. If the assembly worker responsible for attaching the wheel to the front of a car attaches that wheel to the car, then he has fulfilled his primary function: his behavior has delivered value. If a short-order cook at a restaurant accepts orders, cooks food, and hands it to the server, he has fulfilled his task. For geeks, it's different. For geeks, behavior plays a much smaller part in the delivery of value. A programmer may sit at his desk all day and type keys on the keyboard quietly without bothering anyone else, but if he's typed a sonnet instead of a program, it's of no value to the organization. With geekwork, you are attempting to harness the creativity of individuals and groups in its purest form. And although behavior plays a role, it is substantially less important than in almost any other form of work. Because power is about the regulation of behavior, it has very little effect on creativity. Traditional methods of exercising control have little positive effect on the inner state of mind of geeks. And so power itself becomes substantially less important a facet of the relationship between leaders and geeks. ” (location 242)

“ The client had fallen into the classic trap of believing that saying something is the same thing as communicating it. ” (location 447)

“ Many of the constraints that geekwork imposes on leaders and geeks stem from the fact that it is fundamentally creative... work that cannot be controlled in the traditional sense. Inspiration rarely works on a schedule, rarely arrives at the exact moment that the project plan prescribes, and can't be hurried, pressured, or "incentivized." Innovations can't be scheduled, and insight can't be managed. Although they call it computer science, most geekwork looks more like art than science. ” (location 806)

“ You can't create intrinsic motivation, but you can create the environmental conditions under which it develops, just as you can provide conditions under which it is killed. Your challenge is to encourage intrinsic motivation and support it with appropriate extrinsic motivation. ” (location 1170)

“ Exactly how risk management is done is not as important as the fact that it is being done on projects. It may be the biggest return on investment you can get in project management. ” (location 2043)

“ One of the fundamental tenets of modern quality management states that quality is planned, designed, and built in - not inspected in. The cost of preventing mistakes is generally much less than the cost of correcting them when they are found by inspection. ” (location 3828)

“ Perform Quality Control: Tools and Techniques: The first seven of these tools and techniques are known as Ishikawa's seven basic tools of quality. ”

1. Cause and Effect Diagrams (location 4075)
2. Control Charts (location 4086)
3. Flowcharting (location 4096)
4. Histogram (location 4099)
5. Pareto Chart (location 4105)
6. RunChart (location 4114)
7. Scatter Diagram (location 4120)
8. Statistical Sampling (location 4127)
9. Inspection (location 4129)
10. Approved Change Requests Review (location 4134)

“ Risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has an effect on at least one project objective. Objectives can include

• scope,
• schedule,
• cost, and
• quality.

A risk may have one or more causes and, if it occurs, it may have one or more impacts. A cause may be a requirement, assumption, constraint, or condition that creates the possibility of negative or positive outcomes. ” (location 5093)

Strategies for Negative Risks or Threats (location 5537)

• Avoid (location 5541)
• Transfer (location 5545)
• Mitigate (location 5552)
• Accept (location 5558)

Strategies for Positive Risks or Opportunities (location 5562)

• Exploit (location 5566)
• Share (location 5570)
• Enhance (location 5573)
• Accept (location 5575)

“ Philosophers often distinguish between two types of values, intrinsic and instrumental. Any value that serves some further end or good is called an instrumental value because it is tied to some external standard. Automobiles, computers, and money are examples of goods that have instrumental value. Values such as life and happiness, on the other hand, are intrinsic because they are valued for their own sake. ” (page 39)

“ When you discover what the authorities are doing an you protest it, you are told, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." Of course, you could respond that even though you have nothing to hide, you believe that you still have quite a bit to worry about: that is, you have to worry about how to retain your basic freedom and civil liberties as a United States citizen under such conditions. ” (page 215) [There's a difference between nothing to hide and nothing to lose]

“ Unlike tangible objects, which are exclusionary in nature, intellectual objects (e.g., software programs) are nonexclusionary. ” (page 230)

“ consider that copyright laws, originally intended to cover print media, were designed to encourage the distribution of information. We have seen that these laws have since been extended to cover digital media, inhibiting the distribution of electronic information. ” (page 254)

“ Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTTP (the protocol used on the Web), never bothered to apply for a patent for his invention or for a copyright for his code... Also consider that Doug Englebart, who invented the mouse, received no patent for his contribution, ” (page 254)

“ In the near term, corporations and some individuals will profit handsomely from privatization of information policy. In the long term, however, our society may be worse off intellectually, spiritually, and even economically if the short-term goals of privatization are not balanced against the interests of the greater public. ” (page 257)

“ AmI's supporters suggest that humans will gain more control over the environments with which they interact because technology will be more responsive to their needs. However, Brey notes a paradoxical aspect of this claim, pointing out that "greater control" is presumed to be gained through a "delegation of control to machines." But this, he suggests, is tantamount to the notion of "gaining control by giving it away." ” (page 365)

“ if the gains from trade in commodities are substantial, they are small compared to trade in ideas. ” (location 2407)

“ The hinge of this metamorphosis was the Industrial Revolution, begun in Britain in the eighteenth century and emulated around the world. The Industrial Revolution made some countries richer and others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor. This process of selection actually began much earlier, during the age of discovery. For some nations, Spain for example, the Opening of the World was an invitation to wealth, pomp, and pretension - an older way of doing things, but on a bigger scale. For others, Holland and England, it was a chance to do new things in new ways, to catch the wave of technological progress. And for still others, such as the Amerindians or Tasmanians, it was apocalypse, a terrible fate imposed from without. ” (location 2962)

“ Wealth is not so good as work, nor riches so good as earnings. ” (location 3035)

“ Compare the Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward gambling in the early modern period. Both condemned it, but Catholics condemned it because one might (would) lose, and no responsible person would jeopardize his well-being and that of others in that manner. The Protestants, on the other hand, condemned it because one might win, and that would be bad for character. ” (location 3100)

“ The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has argued that this reactionary, anti-Protestant backlash, more than Protestantism itself, sealed the fate of southern Europe for the next three hundred years. Such retreat was neither predestined nor required by doctrine. But this path once taken, the Church, repository and guardian of truth, found it hard to admit error and change course. How hard? One hears nowadays that Rome has finally, almost, rehabilitated Galileo after almost four hundred years. That's how hard. ” (location 3203)

“ Believe the data; the interpretation remains a problem. Theoretical economists have long appreciated this difficulty. ” (location 3444)

“ Some things will never happen if one does not try to make them happen. ” (location 5463)

“ The key lay in the commitment to work rather than to wealth. ” (location 6262)

“ the three G's: God, Gold, and Glory. They all mattered, but the greatest of all was Gold, because gold paid the bills, armed the fleets, lured and consoled the flesh. ” (location 6767)

“ "What is rich?" asks a merchant banker of the Persian Gulf: Rich is education... expertise... technology. Rich is knowing. We have money, yes. But we are not rich. We are like the child who inherits money from the father he never knew. He has not been brought up to spend it. He has it in his hands; he doesn't know how to use it. If you do not know how to spend money, you are not rich. We are not rich. Without this knowledge, this understanding, we are nothing. We import everything. The bricks to make houses, we import. The men who build them, we import. You go to the market, what is there that is made by Arabs? Nothing. It is Chinese, French, American... it is not Arab. Is a country rich that cannot make a brick, or a motorcar, or a book? It is not rich, I think. ” (location 7049)

“ Does it make a doctrine less a matter of belief because it claims to be scientific? ” (location 7793)

“ the end of economic policy is not low prices and discount distribution. The goal is market share, increased capacity, industrial and military strength. Producers are more important than consumers. Anyone can buy, but not everyone can make. ” (location 8175)

“ The dream appealed to the critics and victims of capitalism, admittedly a most imperfect system - but as it turned out, far better than the alternatives. Hence the Marxist economies long enjoyed a willfully credulous favor among radicals, liberals, and progressives in the advanced industrial nations; and a passionate, almost religious endorsement by the militant "anti-imperialist" leaders of the world's poor countries. Many colonies, now independent, turned to the socialist paradigm with a hunger and passion that defied reality. These favorable predilections long concealed the weaknesses of such command economies. ” (location 8499)

“ Communism offered "singing tomorrows." But waiting had to be paid for, and tomorrow never came. When did the people in the queues work? The joke had it, they made believe they worked, and the state made believe it paid them. The worst aspect of the system, however, was its indifference to, nay, its contempt for, good housekeeping and human decency. Prosperity forgone was bad enough. In a world that had once created and still preserved some beautiful things, the new system mass-produced ugliness: buildings and windows out of true; stained and pocked exteriors, raw cement block; equipment out of order, rusting machinery, abandoned metal corpses - in short, raging squalor. Necessarily, what the system did to things, it did to people. How to survive in a wasteland dotted with junk heaps? In a world of systematic contempt for humanity? "White coal," they called the people shipped in jammed, fetid freight cars to useless labor and oblivion in frigid wastes. ” (location 8517)

“ Marxian Socialists and Communists, for all their lip service to science... well illustrates the human limits of good intentions. ” (location 8820)

“ the World War II saying: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." ” (location 98)

“ We have a shortage of sharing rather than a lack of enough. ” (location 273)

“ Growth as a goal has supplanted the real goals, the things growth was supposed to help us achieve. What I and many others have come to see... is that too often, as a strategy, focusing on growth for growth's sake undermines the real goals. Too much of what gets counted toward "growth" today... undermines our net safety, health, and happiness. ” (location 298)

“ Before we can change a paradigm, we need to identify it as a paradigm rather than assume it is truth. ” (location 373)

“ I'm not against Stuff. In fact, I'm pro-Stuff! I want us to value our Stuff more, to care for it, to give it the respect it deserves. I want us to recognize that each thing we buy involved all sorts of resources and labor. Someone mined the earth for the metals in your cell phone; someone unloaded the bales from the cotton gin for your T-shirt. Someone in a factory assembled that pair of sunglasses, and they might have been exposed to carcinogens or forced to work overtime. Someone drove or flew this bouquet around the country or the world to get it to you. We need to understand the true value of our Stuff, far beyond the price tag and far beyond the social status of ownership. Stuff should be longlasting, made with the pride of an artisan and cared for accordingly. ” (location 415)

“ When we cut down a virgin forest to make disposable wooden chopsticks, wrapping them in paper and then burning fossil fuel to ship them halfway around the world, aren't all those processes, not really production but simply consumption, aka destruction? ” (location 460)

“ We also need to require manufacturers to take back electronics when we are done with them. Takeback programs, like those now mandated throughout the European Union, allow manufacturers to recover the tantalum (and other ingredients) for reuse, thus keeping electronic waste out of landfills and decreasing the pressure to mine more. ” (location 1130)

“ American University professor Deborah Bräutigam suggests that governments in natural-resource-based economies don't rely on taxes from citizens, which means that the contract between government and its citizens is weak; citizens can't hold their leaders accountable ” (location 1308) [No representation without taxation]

“ if all countries used resources at the rate that the United States does, we would need about 5 planets to sustain us. ” (location 1373)

“ Each new generation of technical improvements in electronic products should include parallel and proportional improvements in environmental, health and safety as well as social justice attributes. If semiconductor capacity can double every two years, how about likewise halving the number of toxic chemicals and doubling the usable life span of these same devices every two years? ” (location 1834)

“ I have to ask: why have these warnings been aimed at getting people to cease eating fish, rather than at getting the industries to stop putting mercury into our environment? ” (location 2080)

“ We have to work harder to pay for all the services that neighbors, friends, and public agencies used to provide, so we're even more harried and less able to contribute to the community. It's a downward spiral. ” (location 3613)

“ We need to chart a different course. Let's start by challenging the fundamental assumption that producing and consuming Stuff is the central purpose and engine of our economy. We need to understand that the drive to overconsume is neither human nature nor a birthright. We need to object when we are identified as "a nation of consumers"; individually and collectively, we are so much more than consumers, and those other parts of ourselves have been relegated to subordinate roles for too long. ” (location 3692)

“ The architects of the system came up with a strategy to keep consumers buying: planned obsolescence. Another name for planned obsolescence is "designed for the dump." Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who is widely credited with popularizing the term in the 1950s, defined it as "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary." In planned obsolescence, products are intended to be thrown away as quickly as possible and then replaced. ” (location 3826)

“ [A second strategy was] "perceived obsolescence." In this case the item isn't broken, nor is it really obsolete at all; we just perceive it as such. Some people call this "obsolescence of desirability" or "psychological obsolescence." This is where taste and fashion come in to play. ” (location 3853)

“ From a childish point of view, I want the best, cheapest, fastest coffee. From an adult point of view, I want coffee that makes the world safe, healthy, and just. ” (location 4020)

“ You've heard that expression "Necessity is the mother of all invention"? How about: Poverty is the mother of recognition of trash as containing valuable resources? Not so catchy, I know, but it really is true. ” (location 4292)

“ for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 40 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes - and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. ” (location 4333)

“ Because bottle bills are so effective, every time an attempt is made to introduce or expand a bottle bill, the beverage industries go ballistic opposing it - to the tune of $14 million in campaign contributions aimed at defeating a national bottle bill between 1989 and 1994. The opponents argue that deposits are inefficient and old-fashioned, that reusing bottles threatens public health, that deposits simply duplicate what recycling already achieves, and that it constitutes a regressive tax that will hurt local businesses, leading to job losses. Their arguments are bogus. Really, it's about money: it's the beverage industries that will bear the costs of collecting and refilling bottles. ” (location 4498)

“ citizens don't have to be running around picking up after and reinforcing the bad behavior of companies who persist in making poorly designed, excessively packaged toxic junk that breaks too easily and is hard to recycle. If the companies which design and produce this Stuff were held responsible, they'd be making better, longer-lasting, and less-toxic Stuff in the first place. ” (location 4575)

“ If you eat, compost. Simple. ” (location 4807)

“ It is simply wrong for the world's richest countries to dump hazardous waste on the world's poorest ones. Period. I remember talking to a U.S. congressional representative who told me I should find a compromise position. Like what? ” (location 5151)

“ Despite its rainbow-bright image, recycling is often a dirty process... Just because it's called recycling doesn't mean it's green. ” (location 5270)

“ The official term for the "you made it, you deal with it" approach - of which I am a huge fan - is "extended producer responsibility" (EPR), which holds the producers of goods responsible for their entire lifecycle. ” (location 5284)

“ Zero Waste is the mother of environmental no-brainers. ” (location 5304)

“ The agile development movement argues that requirements will always change... because a business is a dynamic entity that is constantly changing. The obvious conclusion: the business analyst works with the development team to implement a solution development approach that embraces changes, reduces the cost of changes, and welcomes changes that add value to the business. ” (location 427)

“ Jesus is being lost in a religion bearing His name. People are being lost because they cannot reconcile Jesus' association with Christianity. Christianity has become docile, domesticated, civilized. We have forgotten that there is a kingdom of darkness stealing the hopes and dreams and souls of a humanity without God. ” (location 189)

“ his fire-and-brimstone message was entirely directed toward the religious, not the irreligious. He was a barbarian in the midst of civilization. And frankly the civilization made him sick. He had no patience for domesticated religionists who were drowning in their own self-righteousness. ” (location 223)

“ Jesus understood His purpose was to save us not from pain and suffering, but from meaninglessness. ” (location 312)

“ God's will for us is less about our comfort than it is about our contribution. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance. God created you so that your life would count, not so that you could count the days of your life. ” (location 437)

“ Anyone who can picture Jesus as the great Advocate of tradition is doing some serious doctoring of biblical history. Jesus was anything but the poster child for status quo. With a band of brothers and a small community of others, Jesus instigated an uprising that He expected to reach the very ends of the earth. ” (location 1046)

“ I've seen far too many kids raised in Christian homes who are indifferent to Christ and often carry a great disdain for the church. Sometimes it's the result of blatant hypocrisy, but other times it's the result of nothing less than sheer monotony and boredom. We raise our children in the cocoon of a domesticated faith and wonder why they run as far as they can to find adventure. ” (location 1096)

“ all Enron proves is that in an age of increasing financial complexity, the "disclosure paradigm" - the idea that the more a company tells us about its business, the better off we are - has become an anachronism. ” (location 2088)

“ Puzzles are "transmitter-dependent"; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are "receiver-dependent"; they turn on the skills of the listener, ” (location 2141)

“ If you were to graph the troubles of the LAPD, it wouldn't look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a power law distribution - where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme. ” (location 2270)

“ In the early 1990s, Culhane's database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade - which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless. It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least $62 million was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. "It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds," Culhane said. "We're talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot." ” (location 2299)

“ They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. ” (location 2318)

“ It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it. ” (location 2340)

“ There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit - to observe the principle of universality - isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Powerlaw problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principals or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both. ” (location 2397)

“ Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way. Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness ” (location 2450)

“ The picture promises certainty, and it cannot deliver on that promise. Even after forty years of research, there remains widespread disagreement over how much benefit women in the critical fifty-to-sixty-nine age bracket receive from breast X-rays, ” (location 2706)

“ Late bloomers' stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We'd like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table. ” (location 3858)

“ your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. ” (location 3916)

“ A group of researchers - Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress - have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications - as much as they appear related to teaching prowess - turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans. ” (location 4065)

“ In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree - and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. ” (location 4096)

“ Psychologists call this tendency - to fixate on supposedly stable character traits and overlook the influence of context - the Fundamental Attribution Error ” (location 4758)

“ the likelihood of being able to build a truly comprehensive integrated application that fits everybody's needs is, well, slim. The German language has a term for it: eierlegende Wollmilchsaun, referring to an egglaying, wool-giving, milk-giving pig - a farmer's dream, except for the fact that, unfortunately, it doesn't exist. ” (location 7238)

“ an intrinsic part of a service includes its technical properties, such as performance, capacity, and availability. Those properties are collectively referred to as the service level. ” (location 7712)

“ An important decision about SLAs concerns what parameters to use to define the service level objectives. A parameter in an SLA must meet three criteria, discussed in the following subsections:
  - Significance: It must be significant and meaningful for the service that is being defined.
  - Relevance: It must be relevant to the context in which the service will be used.
  - Measurability: It must be measurable and objectively verifiable. ” (location 7792)

“ it can be important for the SLA to contain an escape clause that specifies the conditions under which the service contract can be terminated prematurely - better an end with horror than a horror without end. ” (location 8026)

“ Lenin's adage that trust is good but control is better? ” (location 8040)

“ as so often in real life, if there is no accuser, there is no crime ” (location 8044)

“ The classical metrics here are the following:
  - Availability...
  - Mean time between failures...
  - Mean time to repair...
  - Mean time to maintenance. ” (location 8655)

“ Complexity of operational tasks can be assessed in a number of ways, many of which were first articulated in a paper by Brown, Keller, and Hellerstein that was published at the IM 2005 conference. Three different categories of complexity are distinguished:
  - Execution complexity...
  - Parameter complexity...
  - Memory complexity ” (location 8698)

“ Teaching kids the history of the Electoral College doesn't prepare them to be more thoughtful voters - or even to want to vote at all. ” (location 250)

“ Schools haven't changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete - even the ones that score the best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution. ” (location 315)

“ The simplest explanation for the low level of intellectual work and general lack of curiosity found in classrooms - even in our best high schools - is that our schools were never designed to teach all students how to think. Since our system of public education came into being at the turn of the last century, the assumption has been that only those in the college-preparatory classes were going to have to learn how to reason, problem-solve, and so on, and historically they comprised only a small percentage of students. And even those few often learned such skills in school more by accident than by design. For the most part, teachers haven't been trained to teach students how to think. The textbooks and tests we used in the past were not designed to teach and assess the ability to reason or analyze - and they remain substantially the same today. Throughout history and until very recently, most people worked with their hands - not with their heads - and so they didn't need these analytical skills in their daily life. Many generations of the most successful students were often more likely to learn how to think from the conversations they had with parents at the dinner table or during family trips than from their classes. They came to school smart and motivated and left the same, and whatever "value-added" some teachers provided often was and continues to be the result of random acts of excellence - at least in public schools. ” (location 347)

“ To better understand how all of our schools must adapt to new realities, we need to explore three fundamental transformations that have taken place in a very short period of time: ... [3] the sudden and dramatic shift from information that is limited in terms of amount and availability to information characterized by flux and glut. ” (location 383)

“ If you want to encourage young people to be scientists, it's not how much they can retain but how much they can explore. It's how you ask the next question. I can look up anything, but I can't take it to the next level without pushing and exploring. ” (location 497)

“ Our system of public education - our curricula, teaching methods, and the tests we require students to take - were created in a different century for the needs of another era. They are hopelessly outdated. ” (location 543)

“ When I ask large audiences of educators at conferences where I speak how many have read the latest business books, sometimes I don't see a single hand go up. From the little they glean in the media, most educators remain instinctively suspicious of the intentions of corporate leaders who claim that today's graduates are unprepared for the world of work. They've been hearing that the competition is getting ahead and "the sky is falling" for more than twenty years, even as the American economy has appeared to be the envy of the world. Like William Whyte in the 1950s, many educators are concerned that preparation for work is a demand to teach only practical skills and blind obedience to employers. But what preoccupies many educators, as we will see, are the growing pressures to prepare all students for the increased number of "high-stakes" standardized tests. They simply don't have time to worry about abstractions like workforce preparedness. They're a lot more worried about their school or district making what's called "adequate yearly progress" so they're not stigmatized as "failing." Meanwhile, none of us know very much about what's really going on in middle-class classrooms today ” (location 606)

“ I believe that the AP system - and, indeed, much of what passes for academic rigor in college, which the courses attempt to mimic - is not merely "old-fashioned," as Dina suggested. It is hopelessly obsolete. We have long defined rigor in schools as mastery of more and more complex academic content. Many parents who demand more rigor in their children's schools want to see more homework - more math problems and vocabulary to memorize. And many teachers who are considered more rigorous demand that students move at a faster pace and cover more material in their classes. This definition of rigor was institutionalized early in the last century when "Carnegie units" became the way college entrance requirements were defined and standardized - four years of English, three years of math and science, two of a foreign language, and so on. Taking more academic (as opposed to vocational) courses, in which students were required to "cover" (i.e., memorize) more academic content, became the widely accepted definition of rigor for both high school and college and has remained unchallenged for at least a century. But consider how different that era was compared to today's era of information flux and glut. A hundred years ago, there were comparatively few public libraries, most people didn't have access to encyclopedias, and Bill Gates hadn't even been invented yet. Memorizing material made some sense. You couldn't just go look it up, and what you memorized was likely to still be true ten or even twenty years later. Today, though, we're faced with radically different circumstances. ” (location 2225)

“ The most important skill in the New World of work, learning, and citizenship today - the rigor that matters most - is the ability to ask the right questions. Old World rigor is still about having the right answers - and the more, the better. ” (location 2240)

“ In today's world, it's no longer how much you know that matters; it's what you can do with what you know. ” (location 2249)

“ I graduated in June and felt completely unprepared for my new profession. I was now a fully certified and credentialed teacher, with a framed degree and a state certification paper to prove it. Today, by the standards of the No Child Left Behind law, I would be deemed "highly qualified" because of my degree and subject-content preparation. The trouble was, I really didn't know the first thing about teaching. I felt I'd learned absolutely nothing about how to be a good teacher in my master's program. And they were going to set me loose on a bunch of high school students? It sounded a little bit dangerous to me. ” (location 2621)

“ John Seely Brown chairs the International Advisory Board for the Ministry of Education in Singapore... "Their new mantra is 'teach less, learn more,'" Brown told me. "Schools need to focus more on projects and the inquiry method. They need to engage students with passion." ” (location 3510)

“ "As the corporate world moves more and more to barely reachable efficiency levels, they're stripping all dignity from jobs. They say they want creative, innovative thinkers, but then they benchmark them for speed..." What Brown has observed is that many companies do need workers who can innovate, but in many cases they have not yet created the working conditions and incentives that encourage employees to give their best. In effect, they are trying to play a new game by the old rules. ” (location 3569)

“ The Met's Five Learning Goals represent specific intellectual and interpersonal skills in which students must demonstrate mastery through their projects and internships. (location 4163)

1. Communication: "How do I take in and express ideas?"...
2. Empirical Reasoning: "How do I prove it?"...
3. Personal Qualities: "What do I bring to this process?"...
4. Quantitative Reasoning: "How do I measure, compare, or represent it?"...
5. Social Reasoning: "What are other people's perspectives on this?"... ” (location 4166)

“ teaching through the use of questions, as Socrates did, is still considered state-of-the-art and is widely practiced in graduate schools of law and business. ” (location 4519)

“ In the age of the Internet, using new information to solve new problems matters more than recalling old information. ” (location 4542)

“ Students can always look up when the Battle of Gettysburg took place, or who General Sherman was, but they can't just Google the causes of the Civil War and make sense of what comes up on the screen. To understand such an issue, you have to know how to think critically, and you need a broader conceptual understanding of American history, economics, and more. As we've seen, these skills and this kind of knowledge are rarely taught or tested in high schools today. (location 4635)

“ we first must have a long-overdue dialogue - a discussion that might well start with a simple admission and a question: I thought I knew what students needed to learn and what a good school looks like - because I was a student once and I went to school, and it worked for me. But times have changed. And maybe students today do need something different. I wonder what it is? ” (location 4721)

“ Employers are beginning to wise up to the fact that students' college transcripts, GPAs, and test scores are a poor predictor of employee value. Google famously used to hire only students from name-brand colleges with the highest GPAs and test scores. However, according to recent interviews with Lazlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, these data are "worthless" as predictors of employee effectiveness at Google. The company now looks for evidence of a sense of mission and personal autonomy and is increasingly hiring people who do not have a college degree. ” (location 5132)

“ While use of standardized tests to measure school and teacher effectiveness has mushroomed since I wrote the first edition of this book, I have discovered that no corporations make important hiring or promotion decisions on the basis of a standardized test score. ” (location 5208)

“ Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, recently wrote, "The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure. There are several things that might help to explain why this is happening - ranging from our overzealous focus on standardized testing and curricula to our lack of experiential and project-based learning pathways for students" ” (location 5212)

“ One of the reasons why our current education reform efforts are unlikely to produce real improvements is that they are compliance-driven, punitive, and rooted, I believe, in a profound distrust of teachers. ” (location 5256)

“ Innovation is a process that transforms ideas into outputs, which increase customer value. ” (location 302)

“ Creativity is a mental process that results in the production of novel ideas and concepts that are appropriate, useful, and actionable. ” (location 335)

“ A common mistake technology companies make is to focus on the technological capability of their offering rather than on how that technology can satisfy customer needs. ” (location 377)

“ The driving force in creating disruptive technologies is the same as for any innovation, that is, to add value for customers that will encourage them to purchase products and services over and over from the same organization. ” (location 560)

“ when an organization's turnover [a.k.a. revenue] is decreasing, this is perhaps the time when the investment percentage should be increased. ” (location 906)

“ As a consequence of the turbulent nature of innovation, a certain level of failure is an inevitable part of the innovation process and directly related to the level of risk the company is comfortable exposing itself to. ” (location 917)

“ Organizations can learn more about failure when it is openly discussed and debated. Lessons learned from failure often reside longer in the organizational consciousness than lessons learned from success. ” (location 924)

“ The balanced scorecard is regarded by many analysts and practitioners as one of the most effective management techniques in recent decades. The balanced scorecard was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (1996) as an approach to strategic management and associated performance measurement and development initiatives. ” (location 1528)

“ The balanced scorecard divides strategic objectives, performance measures, and any associated development initiatives into four perspectives:

• financial perspective,
• customer perspective,
• internal processes perspective, and
• learning and growth perspective. ” (location 1533)

“ The balanced scorecard encourages the company to focus on five important measures. The company should then customize these five measures to the organization's target customers:

• Market share: This measures customer spending and products sold in a given market.
• Customer retention: This measures the rate at which the company retains existing customers.
• Customer acquisition: This measures how many new customers are investing in the products.
• Customer satisfaction: This measures how happy the customers are with existing offerings relative to competitors.
• Customer profitability: This measures the net profit per customer after expenses to support customers are taken into account. ” (location 1539)

“ A scorecard must be carefully designed so that it leads to an ongoing series of management decisions, actions, and reviews. ” (location 1551)

“ it is incorrect to think that controlling implementation according to the plan guarantees success. On the contrary, often, the more high performing the team, the more it wants to deviate from the plan and improve the specification as it goes along. In practice a good project team and an effective leader constantly modify the project's plans as it develops. They check the modifications with the stakeholders and the external environment, identify any problems, replan where necessary, and renegotiate resources and support if needed. ” (location 1925)

“ in order to maximize a person's value to the organization, the optimal number of projects for a person to be involved in is two ” (location 2346)

“ Transactional leaders often are regarded as conservative bureaucrats who abide by the rules of the organization. A transformational leader, on the other hand, is viewed as a maverick who continuously challenges established authority, attempts to seize every opportunity, questions every rule, and motivates and controls people through personal loyalty. ” (location 2471)

“ Because leaders usually have more power and control than followers, they also have more responsibility to be sensitive to how their leadership affects followers' lives. ” (location 7877)

“ being honest is not just about telling the truth. It has to do with being open with others and representing reality as fully and completely as possible. This is not an easy task, however, because there are times when telling the complete truth can be destructive or counterproductive. The challenge for leaders is to strike a balance between being open and candid while monitoring what is appropriate to disclose in a particular situation. Many times, there are organizational constraints that prevent leaders from disclosing information to followers. It is important for leaders to be authentic, but it is also essential that they be sensitive to the attitudes and feelings of others. ” (location 8026)

“ I have often wondered since reentering the United States why I feel such great culture shock. How can I feel such a disconnect with the place where I was born, raised, and for eighteen years called home? How can I feel that my real home is a place in which I have spent just over a year? I have blamed it on many things. American extravagance. The grocery store that almost sends me into panic mode due to the sheer quantity and variety of foods. People who build million-dollar homes. The lack of understanding and lack of thanksgiving on the part of all of us. The ease with which we receive medical care. The amount of stuff that just clutters our lives. All these things make it difficult to readjust, yes. But what has been the biggest shock to my system, the huge disconnect, is that I have stepped out of my reliance on God to meet my needs. I "miss" Jesus. He hasn't disappeared, of course, but I feel so far from Him becaues my life is actually functioning without Him. By "functioning" I mean that if I am sick, I go to the drugstore or to the doctor. If I am hungry, I go to the grocery store. If I need to go somewhere, I get in my car. When I need some advice or guidance, I call my mom or go plop on my roommate's bed. If I want to feel happy, I get Brad, my little brother, or someone else to make me laugh. I keep forgetting to ask God first to heal me, to fill me, to rejoice with me. I have to set aside "time to pray" in the morning and at night instead of being in constant communication with Him. In Uganda, because I was so physically "poor," I was completely dependent on God and spiritually as wealthy as ever. As I sit here writing, I am frustrated with my own stupidity, my human willingness to step back into dependence on stuff and these places I swore I detested. ”

“ Traditional management, which performed so well in economic terms in the twentieth century, is no longer a good fit for today’s social and economic conditions. ” (Location 550)

“ Businesses have to change their focus from producing goods and services to an explicit goal of delighting clients.​ It's no longer enough merely to remove defects... Delighting clients is the primary goal-a means to competitive advantage and profitability. It takes precedence over profits, turnover, and market share. ” (Location 600)

“ When the delight of the client is kept continuously and rigorously in mind, many of the problems of the workplace disappear, and the possibilities of a different kind of work-more productive and more satisfying-become possible. When that principle is ignored, all sorts of workplace problems become insoluble. ” (Location 1144)

“ The fact that clients are more likely to be delighted, businesses are more likely to be profitable, and workers are more likely to be fulfilled in their work constitutes a triple win for all involved. ” (Location 1167)

“ Once the firm adopts self organizing teams aimed at delighting clients, downsizing and outsourcing are seen in their true light as counterproductive to everything the firm is trying to accomplish. ” (Location 1563)

“ A further cause was the failure to recognize that self organizing teams were at odds with the prevailing default model of management: hierarchical bureaucracy. As a result, when real teams emerged, particularly high performance teams, management had a tendency to suppress them. That’s because a high performance team typically becomes more productive by breaking the rules, and a bureaucracy hates having rules broken. A group that breaks rules may be tolerated for a period, but eventually the rules take over, the group is “brought back into line,” and high performance ends. The participants return to the daily grind. Enhanced productivity is not enough to save the group. In a bureaucracy, order trumps performance. ” (Location 1955)

“ The essence of bureaucracy is that the manager knows best and stays in control at all times. ” (Location 2060)

“ While searching for God's will we must not overlook God's word. ”

“ Any pan is 'no-stick' if you no cook in it ”

“ God created us in His own image and yet we try to return the favor, and ultimately no matter what we feel or no matter what we think does not determine or change who God is in His purest essence. ” [We also want to make everyone else in our image.]

“ Q: Why is there a double standard for men and women on the issue of sex and first dates? A: It is easy for a woman, all she has to do is walk into a bar and say 'ok' so the label 'easy' is accurate. But it is much more difficult for a man, so if he succeeds he is admired for his persuasion skill. ” [Note I do not approve of sex outside of marriage but found this to be a very honest explanation worth recording.]

“ Even a broken clock is right twice a day. ”

“ Life is a roller coaster, not a monorail. ”

“ Our problems are big if we have a small God but small if we have a big God. ”

“ Salvation is free (to receive) but cost Christ everything (to make available) and still costs you everything (to obey). ”

“ If Satan, our spiritual enemy, can't make us really really bad then he'll try to make us really really busy. ”

“ Sin never leaves us happy, satisfied or content, it may have momentary pleasure but it evaporates and leaves us empty and miserable. ”

“ Exposing sin is like exposing cancer, it may not be fun but can save your life. ”

“ What have you done that you believe in and are proud of? ”

“ If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? ” [Matthew 7:20]

“ The church today is neither super nor natural. ”

“ You have to be before you can do, and you have to do before you can have. ”

“ Nobody ever built anything uniquely impressive by simply following directions ”

“ Don't tell me the sky is the limit when I know there are footprints on the moon. ”

“ Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean. ”

“ Wounded people wound ”

“ As one insider joked, 'President Trump may not be a Sunday school teacher, but he sure knows how to hire them.' ”