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Prior Quotes of the WeekDecember 31, 1997Quote of the Week (1997.12.21) "I longed for a group whose members needed and made demands on each other. But my friends and I had been taught to value independence, not to impose on each other. If we needed our house painted, we hired a painter; if we needed a cup of sugar, we drove to the market. "Deeper bonds meant creating obligations. . . "To follow 'a path that has heart,' to take it wherever it leads, is not an Amish value, but it is a way I've come to value. I set out on an unfamiliar path toward an unknown conclusion. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was hoping for answers, but I kept finding my way back to the question: What really matters? "What I was learning was never what I expected. What I am learning doesn't stay with me all the time; but I have glimpses, then it slips away. When I started this journey, I had a picture of the right way to be and the right things to do. Living with the Amish changed all that. Now this quilt, this book, this life is teaching me to trust, no matter what life turns out to be--even if it is not what I expected, or what I thought I wanted. "And I am not wise. Not knowing, and learning to be comfortable with not knowing, is a great discovery. "Miracles come after a lot of hard work. . . . "I used to think depending on others was a weakness. "Depending on others became a strength."
Quote of the Week
(1997.12.14) "Picasso's portrait [of Gertrude Stein] and Manet's painting
[The Execution of Maximilian] get us closer to one of the most characteristic
features of a good model: Such a model captures the essence of its
subject. John L. Casti "When you look at a flower without the word, without the
image, and with a mind that is completely attentive, then what is the relationship
between you and the flower? Have you ever done it? Have you ever looked at a
flower without saying 'That is a rose'? Have you ever looked at a flower completely,
with total attention in which there is no word, no symbol, no naming of the
flower, and therefore, complete attention? Until you do that, you have no relationship
with the flower. J. Krishnamurti
Quote of the Week (1997.11.30) "When you're betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you're betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim. And when you're betting for real gold, you're a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases--but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside. ". . .Woodworker Ch'ing carved a piece of wood and made a bell stand, and when it was finished, everyone who saw it marveled, for it seemed to be the work of gods or spirits. When the marquis of Lu saw it, he asked, 'What art is it you have?' "Chi'ing replied, 'I am only a craftsman--how could I have any art? There is one thing, however. When I am going to make a bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy. I always fast in order to still my mind. When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends. When I have fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the ruler and his court no longer exist for me. My skill is concentrated and all outside distractions fade away. After that, I go into the mountain forest and examine the Heavenly nature of the trees. If I find one of superlative form, and I can see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the job of carving; if not, I let it go. This way I am simply matching up "Heaven" with "Heaven." That's probably the reason that people wonder if the results were not made by spirits.'"
Quote of the Week (1997.11.23) "Likewise, the subtle energy of the body may be important not so much as a material manifestation but in the way its information or "field of meaning" acts to orchestrate the body's functioning. "When you are faced with a daunting physical task you pull from somewhere within yourself the intention to act. You know an instant before you begin if you will be successful or not, for the result does not so much depend on your own physical strength as on the power of that inner will, that 'energy' you feel within you. Just as within a laser a small energy can have a tremendous effect, so, too, by coordinating the body's forces one can, in an emergency, lift incredible weights or walk great distances. Likewise, when a people are filled with 'spirit' they are able to do great tasks and overcome great obstacles. "Healing is the activation and renewal of spirit in the individual and the group. The operation of spirit may, in some way, be connected with that experience of power we all feel within ourselves, with recovery to health that sometimes comes about when we discover a new meaning to our lives, and with the way in which a small group of individuals can perform great tasks."
Quote of the Week (1997.11.16) "We ask you to consider this crucial shift in thinking--the shift to seeing the company itself as the ultimate creation. . . . It means spending less of your time thinking about specific product lines and market strategies, and spending more of your time thinking about organizational design. . . "We don't mean to imply that the visionary companies never had superb products or good ideas. They certainly did. And, . . . most of them view their products and services as making useful and important contributions to customers' lives. Indeed, these companies don't exist just to 'be a company'; they exist to do something useful. But we suggest that the continual stream of great products and services from highly visionary companies stems from them being outstanding organizations, not the other way around. Keep in mind that all products, services, and great ideas, no matter how visionary, eventually become obsolete. But a visionary company does not necessarily become obsolete, not if it has the organizational ability to continually change and evolve beyond existing product life cycles."
Quote of the Week
(1997.11.09) "Living and walking in the village each day was like walking into myself, as a loving plane of existence. I used to jog, run, or walk through the village every morning just so I could get my loving pats from the village sites. There were the weathered pathways which wound their way among the adobe style structures, the open space in the center of the village, and the mountains in the distance. On early morning walks I used to enjoy breathing the familiar air. The fresh air, like a resonating intelligence hanging as a cover on the surfaces of the village, was delightful to drink into my lungs. Yet, each day the experiences were interestingly different and spatially new. It was not uncommon for me to walk into alternate realities unexpectedly. . . . The energy was always shifting, was always different. The resonating vibrations in the sacred sites were always changing so that the people in the village were always alive with energy. These sacred spaces, generating life sustaining powers, maintained our integrity as a group, orienting each individual toward the community's highest ideals."
Quote of the
Week (1997.11.02) "'At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist even when they separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn't separated. It's actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another. . . . If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be remarkable. They would stand out so much that everyone would know they were different. "'You're on the verge of a creative movement. Just go with it. You cannot be fixed in how you're going about it any more than you would be fixed if you were setting about to paint a great work of art. Be alert, be self-aware, so that when opportunity presents itself, you can actually rise to it. "'Everything starts with you and me.'"
Quote of the Week (1997.10.26) "After tiering your company's customers by value, group them into portfolios based on similar needs, and then assign a customer manager to each portfolio. . . . Give the customer managers line responsibility for all the communications and dialogue interactions with the customers in their own portfolios. . . . "The customer manager's responsibility is to manage each customer relationship, supervising the firm's dialogue with each, finding products and services for each, and determining how best to customize to meet each customer's individual specifications. . . It is the customer manager who should be relied on to push for expanding the customer need set, creating collaborative marketing opportunities. . . . "To complete the make-to-order feedback loop, driving the enterprise's actual behavior according to the needs expressed by individual customers, the customer manager will need to rely on capabilities managers. . . . A capability manager's job is to decide how to tailor the enterprise's production, logistics, and service delivery capabilities to the needs of the firm's individual customers as these needs are recognized and interpreted by customer managers. . . . "The customer manager says" Many of my customers want the product delivered this way. The capabilities manager then figures out how and whether it can be done."
Quote of the Week (1997.10.19) "You weaken structural tension when you lower your vision. If you compromise what you want, you do not create the true discrepancy that forms the tension. It is all too common in our society to misrepresent what we really want. We have been encouraged to 'be realistic,' 'be practical,' and 'want only what you can have.' The irony is that you want what you want, whether or not you misrepresent that to yourself. "You do not know what you can accomplish. Is it 'realistic' to give up before you start? Is it practical to lie to yourself? History is filled with examples of individuals creating results that were previously thought to be impossible. "The only time you know for sure whether creating a result is possible or not is when you have done it. All other thoughts on the matter are simply speculation."
Quote of the Week (1997.10.05) ". . .cities simply cannot be 'explained' by their locations or other given resources. Their existence as cities and the sources of their growth lie within themselves, in the processes and growth systems that go on within them. Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential. To say that a city grew 'because' it was located at a good site for trading is, in the view of what we can see in the real world, absurd. "Provided that some groups on earth continue either muddling or revolutionizing themselves into periods of economic development, we can be absolutely sure of a few things about future cities. The cities will not be smaller, simpler or more specialized than cities of today. Rather, they will be more intricate, comprehensive, diversified, and larger than today's, and will have even more complicated jumbles of old and new things than ours do. The bureaucratized, simplified cities, so dear to present-day city planners and urban designers, and familiar also to readers of science fiction and utopian proposals, run counter to the processes of city growth and economic development. Conformity and monotony, even when they are embellished with a froth of novelty, are not attributes of developing and economically vigorous cities. The are attributes of stagnant settlements. To some people, the vision of a future in which life is simpler than it is now, and work has become so routine as to be scarcely noticeable, is an exhilarating vision. To other people, it is depressing. But no matter. The vision is irrelevant for developing and influential economies of the future. In highly developed future economies, there will be more kinds of work to do than today, not fewer. And many people in great, growing cities of the future will be engaged in the unroutine business of economic trial and error. They will be faced with acute practical problems which we cannot now imagine.They will add new work to older work."
Other Prior Quotes: July 6, 1997 through September 28, 1997
copyright © 1997, MG Taylor Corporation.
All rights reserved 19971019190125.web.bsc |
Sue Bender
Roughly speaking,
this means that the symbols and objects of the model are sufficiently rich to
allow us to express the questions we want to ask about the slice of reality
the model represents, and, furthermore, that the model provides answers to these
questions."
To have any relationship
with another or with the rock or with the leaf, one has to watch and to observe
with complete attention. Then your relationship to that which you see is entirely
different. Then there is no observer at all. There is only that. If you so observe,
then there is no opinion, no judgment. It is what it is. Have you understood?
Will you do it? Look at a flower that way. Do it, sir, don't talk about it,
but do it."
Chuang Tzu (Burton Watson,
translator)
F. David Peat
James C. Collins and Jerry I.
Porras
Joseph Rael,
quoted by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in
David Bohm quoted by Joseph
Jaworski in
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers,
Ph.D.
Robert Fritz
Jane Jacobs
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