Socrates Says

Friday Filosophy #2015-32

Last week I ended with some quotes from Charles Handy. This week, for Friday Filosophy #2015-32 we will be reading quotes from Peter Drucker.

If any of you would like to send me your favorite quotes we will make a compilation of them for a future post. Thanks for your help.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.

What gets measured gets improved.

Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

Long range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

The time is now.

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Friday Filosophy v.07.08.2022

Jacques-Yves Cousteau known as Jacques Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He helped create the Aqua-Lung, helped marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. He was also known He was also known as "le Commandant Cousteau" or "Captain Cousteau".

He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau attended Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École Navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. After an automobile accident cut short his career in naval aviation, Cousteau changed to studying the sea.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).[source?]

On 12 July 1937 he married Simone Melchior (1919-1990), with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1991, after his wife Simone's death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982), born during Cousteau's marriage to his first wife.

On the morning of 25 June 1997, Jacques-Yves Cousteau died at his home in Paris, aged 87 from a heart attack. Despite rumors, encouraged by some Islamic publications and websites, Cousteau did not convert to Islam, and when he died he was buried in a Roman Catholic Christian funeral. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac in France. A street was named "rue du Commandant Cousteau" in a street which runs near his native house, where a commemorative plaque was affixed.

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting.

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.

A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.

The Time is Now

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July 8, 2022

Have you noticed how the increase in productivity has caused many of us to have fewer man hours of support per dollar sold? This is a phenomenon of business that has really grown in the past thirty years. The US GDP is seriously dependent on personal spending which has grown as a result of productivity increases providing higher incomes, until, that is 2008 and the financial meltdown. We need to get back there don’t we?

The trouble in the customer service world which most businesses in the capital goods world are seeing is that their markets are fragmenting. The various modes of customer contact used to be mail order, phone order, fax order or walk in order business. To that we now have the internet or self-service business. But this is a very different business model. Many of you are still waiting for this to happen, you are in denial. Don’t wait too long as time is now your enemy not your friend.

Sometimes you can wait comfortably and let others pave the way and you can avoid the costly mistakes of being “first in the dirt.” But time has come.

You all need to provide a portal for your customers to find you on line and be able to “shop” your site for your wares. They need to be able to easily find you, find what they want, price it and even order it. Your competitors are doing it. Are you? The time is now.

September 18, 2012

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