Pithy Quotes

“When you walk through our hallways, you see people bouncing of the walls. That’s good. I like to be able to try to reign people in instead of trying to ‘create’ an energy. Once you have to create an energy, you’ve got the wrong people.”
~ TOM JURICH (Athletic Director, University of Louisville)

“And this is the ‘ultimate’ design. Until we release the next one.”
~ BLOG COMMENT

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
~ BILL GATES

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
~ THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“I’ve waved my flags into the sun, I’ve fought my wars and now they’re won, and I didn’t need nobody’s gun, I bent their minds.”
~ MINDBENDER (Song Lyric)

“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.”
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

The emphasis should be on why we do a job.
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

“You can not inspect quality into the product; it is already there.”
~ W. EDWARDS DEMING

“Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.”
~ SETH GODIN

“Excellence isn’t about meeting the spec, it’s about setting the spec.”
~ SETH GODIN

“Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.”
~ SETH GODIN

“Ideas aren’t a sideshow that make our factory a little more valuable. Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable!”
~ SETH GODIN

“If you don’t have time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have time to do it over?”
~ SETH GODIN

“Two different things:
A crowd is a tribe without a leader.
A crowd is a tribe without communication.
Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.”
~ SETH GODIN

“The linchpin is an individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen. Every worthwhile institution has indispensable people who make differences like these.”
~ SETH GODIN

“Fear for a linchpin is a clue that you’re getting close to doing something important.”
~ SETH GODIN

“If you’re remarkable, then it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise — ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.
Playing it safe. Following the rules. They seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. The current marketing “rules” will ultimately lead to failure. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”
~ SETH GODIN

“The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides…It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.”
~ SETH GODIN

“‘How was your day?’ is a question that matters a lot more than it seems.”
~ SETH GODIN

“What Every Good Marketer Knows:
* Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
* Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
* Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
* Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
* Marketing begins before the product is created.
* Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
* Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
* Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
* Products that are remarkable get talked about.
* Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
* You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once un-fooled, talk about the experience.
* If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
* People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
* You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
* What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
* Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
* Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness.
* At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
* People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
* Good marketers tell a story.
* People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
* Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
* Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
* Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
* A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
* Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation-rich world.
* Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
* Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
* Good marketers measure.
* Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
* One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
* In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
* Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
* There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
* Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
* You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
* You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
* Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.
Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.”
~ SETH GODIN

“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”
~ CHARLIE PARKER

“Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding up both puppets!”
~ BILL HICKS

“If you can measure it, you can improve it.”
~ LORD KELVIN (adopted)

“People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.”
~ SIMON SINEK

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
~ MARK TWAIN

“Opportunities will be available to you that you cannot imagine.”
~ NEIL ARMSTRONG

“The Definition of Credit:
It gives you money you don’t have,
to buy things you don’t need,
so you have to keep working job you don’t like.”
~ JOE POP-O-PIE

“To be truly commercial is to do well that which should not be done at all.”
~ GORE VIDAL

“We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.”
~ JOHN LOCKE

“The only social justice movements worth fighting for are the struggles for justice where you lose, you lose, you lose– until you win.”
~ I.F. STONE

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”
~ from Invisible Man (by RALPH ELLISON)

“That subject matter has never left me…The more you’re in the material world, the more there is a tendency for a search for serenity and a need to not be distracted by physical elements that are around you.”
~ MARTIN SCORSESE

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
~ CHUCK PALAHNIUK

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
~ CHARLES DARWIN

“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ‘em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ‘em.”
~ SHEL SILVERSTEIN

“Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
~ ISAAC ASSIMOV

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
~ DR. SEUSS

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
~ ANAIS NIN

“A great idea fulfills the promise of its logic.”
~ UNKNOWN (UCLA hallway)

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”
~ WILLIAM GOLDMAN

“A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further then a great idea that inspires no one.”
~ MARY KAY ASH (founder Mary Kay Cosmetics)

“Yuppies ask you what you do. Hippies ask you where you’re from.”
~ COLLEGE FRIEND

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
~ SUN TSU

“I can’t give you a sure fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
~ HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE (American journalist/editor & first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize)

“We don’t want to be entertainers. We want to play music.”
~ JERRY GARCIA

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
~ JOHN GREEN

“I am not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.”
~ MITT ROMNEY, May 2012

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
~ NIELS BOHR (Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner)

“We need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren’t as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in the society.”
~ WARREN BUFFET

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
~ CONFUCIUS

“It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”
~ DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING (from a speech given at Iowa’s Grinnell College)

“The market system rewards me outlandishly for what I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m any more deserving of a good life than a teacher or a doctor or someone who fights in Afghanistan.”
~ WARREN BUFFET

“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
~ MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”
~ DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING

“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen…but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”
~ ERWIN SCHRODINGER

“I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.”
~ CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Vanity Fair, October 2010)

“Money doesn’t change anyone…it reveals them.”
~ UNKNOWN

“Pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice. Pain is what the world does to you, suffering is what you do to yourself.”
~ BUDDHIST TEACHING from the Noble Eightfold Path (1st Noble Truth – Right Understanding)

“There’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy idea.”
~ ANSEL ADAMS

“It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
~ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, MARK TWAIN, SOCRATES (and others) – [A favorite example of apposition known as a 'paraprosdokian.']

“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”
~ LOU REED

“Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.”
~ DAVID OGILVY

“Contemporary society makes no distinction between information and wisdom.”
~ NIETZSCHE

“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
~ FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

“Begin with the end in mind.”
~ STEPHEN COVEY

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.”
~ STEPHEN COVEY

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
~ ARISTOTLE

“Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult.”
~ HIPPOCRATES (from THE APHORISMS)

“The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept, first was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding.”
~ JOHN MEDINA

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
~ PLATO