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General Project Quotations


"If it is developed thoughtlessly and applied mindlessly, process can become the death of common sense" - Philip K. Howard

A leader knows where to go, and goes - J Erskine

"Do, or do not, there is no try." - Yoda

"Failure to prepare is preparing to fail" - Ben Franklin

Management Myopia : The subconscious tells you that anything you don't understand must be easy.

"Risk management is project management for adults" - Tim Lister

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"
- Einstein

"Not every group is a team and not every team is effective."

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly
comparable to herding cats. -- The Washington Post Magazine, 1985

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan,
more doubtful of success, more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system.
For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old
institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones."
-- Machiavelli

"Any fool can defend his/her mistakes, most fools do!" - Dale Carnegie

"The moral virtues, then, are engendered in us neither by nor contrary to nature ... their full development is in us due to habit ... Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it. Men will become good builders as a result of building well and bad ones as a results of building badly ... so it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age - it makes a vast difference, or rather, all the difference in the world."
-- Aristotle

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous
- (Bill Waterson) - Calvin / Hobbes.

Experience is largely non-transferrable.

"The best is the enemy of the good." Voltaire

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence. Michael O'Brien

Judge a leader by his followers.

"If you can't explain something to a six year old, you don't really understand it" - Einstein

Albert Einstein, three rules of work
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to
solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know
it is wrong." -- Buckminster Fuller

"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem."
- Edwards' Law

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf (engineer and linguist).

"All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong."
-- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, p. 178.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good when people acclaim him.
Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done,
his aim fullfilled, they will say, "we did it ourselves."
-- Lao-Tzu, c. 550 BC

Big jobs usually go to those who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants, and the self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while their doing it."
--Theodore Roosevelt.

There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and even less the ability to lead somewhere that will be to the advantage of the led...
--Bergen Evans.

OFFICE ARITHMETIC
Smart boss + smart employee = profit
Smart boss + dumb employee = production
Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion
Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime

By working faithfully 8 hours a day, you may get eventually get to be a boss and work 12
hours a day.

-Robert Frost