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"Improvements become easily deferrable under cost control's myopic focus.
Our attention to the cost of our efforts can destroy any understanding of their
underlying value. Which improvement initiatives are most likely to survive when
the economy sours our expectations? The ones that the organization believes are
valuable."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"Discontinuous progress is more useful, allowing some stasis between the chaos of change. Excessive targets merely inflate reasonable expectations. The result is unreason masquerading as reasonable."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"Americans today ... work ...in the newly risen service economy. That means most of us make our living by being nice."
Ian Frazier "On The Rez" |
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"Few could be more poorly suited to this calling. I cannot remember the color of my own shoes without sneaking a quick peek. I never remember faces. I rarely recall names."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"..."But experience is not simply right-handed. Experience is ambidextrous. Much of what is worth learning can only be grasped with our non-dominant hand."
"
David A. Schmaltz |
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"...there is something about relationships that doesn’t love or need
full disclosure."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"If short-term memory holds "The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two"
discrete values, the error is half that, or 1/14 the range of whatever
we're talking about. If it's a schedule of around a year, I'd be very suspicious
of any refinement under a month in duration, just because people have trouble
with that kind of discrimination."
James Bullock |
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Step on a crack and break your mother's back."
Childhood Rhyme |
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"Here is another liability: beautiful drawings can become ends in themselves.
Often, if the drawing deceives, it is not only the viewer who is enchanted
but also the maker, who is the victim of his own artifice. Alberti understood
this danger and pointed out that architects should not try to imitate painters
and produce lifelike drawings. The purpose of architectural drawings, according
to him, was merely to illustrate the relationship of the various parts...
Alberti understood, as many architects of today do not, that the rules
of drawing and the rules of building are not one and the same, and mastery
of the former does not ensure success in the latter."
Witold Rybczynski,
The Most Beautiful House in the World,
p. 121: Alberti's Law: |
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The brain does not achieve fine discrimination by pushing fine discrimination
forward in the senses and by producing a more sensitive physical apparatus.
...the brain has had to solve the problem of achieving fine discrimination
with a course apparatus. And in many ways you can say about all human problems,
whether in science or in literature, whether physical or psychological,
that they always center around the same problem: How do you refine the
detail with an apparatus which remains at bottom grainy and course?"
Jacob Bronowski
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination |
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"Withholding our trust does not create "better safe than sorry," it
makes ourselves the most sorry kind of safe."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"We have the potential to discard the dysfunctional notion that projects
work best when controlled by a strong, buggy whip-wielding hand, embracing
instead the belief that projects work best when managed by a powerful,
congruent community. It can be no one person's responsibility for success.
If we want to move at speeds exceeding that of a walking horse, which has
been our maximum potential for most of human existence, we must set the
buggy whip aside."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"The actual content of the given ideology is of no consequence
in regard to the reality created by acceptance of that ideology. It may
completely contradict the content of another ideology. The results, however,
are of terrifying stereotypy."
Paul Watzlawick
Components of Ideological "Realities" |
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"The traumatic lesson the military learned from Vietnam is: no more
interventions. Rather than, how best can we intervene? And you have to
plan so you're not stumbling into things or making them up as you go along."
Gen. George Joulwan,
former NATO supreme allied commander |
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"We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted
him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of
their barbarous ancestors."
Thomas Jefferson |
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"You can't build a relationship as a role -- only as a person.
You can't build a relationship without first really showing up yourself."
Amy Schwab |
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"...being smart is not so much different from
being a bone head. We can, by the way we judge success, make a bone head
out of the most gifted genius."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"The plan is a portrait of the planners, not of the proposed project."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"We can move the earth and leave the world unchanged. We can change
our hearts and influence everything."
David A. Schmaltz
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"...uncertainty does not necessarily need fixing. It is not just a
primitive form of certainty. It is a different animal."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"Their insistence upon finding the rational solution prevents them
from finding a pleasing one. Their search for rationality is irrational."
David A. Schmaltz |
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"...it works best for me to decide that the pieces that show up really
do fit together in the most pleasing way imaginable."
Amy Schwab |
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"Columbus [kept track of his position across an ocean] five centuries
ago with little more than a compass, and he didn't even know how
that worked."
David Burch |
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"As a tool for understanding psychological maturation, learning theory
is straightforward, clear, remarkably simple, and wrong."
Clifford Anderson, MD |
