As it turns out, Gehry is concerned not with the precise angles or dimensions of a building, but with the emotional impression it instills in observers and inhabitants. The ability to convey this impression is elusive and fragile, he maintains, and can easily be lost in the neat, unambiguous precision of a two-dimensional drawing.

To capture the building's intended emotional content, Gehry maintains, everyone working on the building should keep creating throughout the construction process. Withholding blueprints is a way of making sure that happens. Forgoing a detailed plan is disruptive it creates convolution, making a neat and well-defined process messy.

"There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept."

Mercer did not think at all in the accepted sense of the word. Ideas occurred to him and engendered other ideas. But the process which linked any two of them was a dark procession taking place in some subconscious part of the brain.

There are occasions when the intellect retires gracefully from a situation entirely behind its decorous control and leaves all the other complicated machinery of the mind to muddle through on its own.

The other pictures varied between the sentimentally lewd and the illustrated Scotch joke variety wherein Glengarried dogs take the place of figures. There were no books and a small writing table with drawers was the only sign of mental activity.

... in an age when all the deepest emotions can be successfully laughed out of existence by any decently educated person, the sanctity and importance of sudden death was a comforting and salutary thing, a last little rock, as it were, in the shifty sands of one's own standards and desires.

He made the discovery with a certain amount of relief, since it took him at least out of the region of pure fantasy and into the merely thoroughly outrageous, with which as a modern he was by now more or less familiar.

When an AT&T rep suggested Jobs wear a suit to meet with AT&T's CEO, the deputy replied, "We're Apple. We don't wear suits. We don't even own suits."

Model II encourages the individual to maximize his uniqueness. If, in doing so, he should arrive at goals that differ from those developed by others, he will have done so under conditions of openness, trust and risk-taking. The individual would therefore feel free to discuss his differences openly with the group. Moreover, if the individual is in a subordinate power position, and if he feels he had adequate opportunity to dissuade the group and that the group publicly confronted and tested all differences, then the individual will probably be motivated to work toward the group goal but still be motivated to generate new information that may change the group's decision. This means that one can be externally committed to a decision and internally committed to the decision-making processes that produced the decision yet simultaneously monitor the consequences of the decision thoroughly to seek new, valid information to reconfront the decision without being considered disloyal. In the model-II world, conflicts do not disappear--indeed, the illusion of conflict disappearing is more typical of the model-I world, in which conflicts are settled by power plays based on sanctions, charisma or loyalty.

Clearly, Model II touches on values that are central to social life and to the traditions of moral philosophy: freedom of choice, truth and testability, the nature of commitment, the possibilities for and limitations on openness in communication among individuals, the basis for trust and cooperation among human beings, the sources of long-term personal effectiveness.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The following four principles, each based on an archetype, comprise what I call the Four-Fold Way:

1. Show up, or choose to be present. Being present allows us to access the human resources of power, presence, and communication. This is the way of the Warrior.

2. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Paying attention opens us to the human resources of love, gratitude, acknowledgment, and validation. This is the way of the Healer.

3. Tell the truth without blame or judgment. Nonjudgmental truthfulness maintains our authenticity, and develops our inner vision and intuition. This is the way of the Visionary.

4. Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome. Openness and nonattachment help us to recover the human resources of wisdom and objectivity. This is the way of the Teacher.

One frequent analogy casts the manager in the role of an airplane pilot guided by organizational measures that are like cockpit instruments.

Mechanistic and organic analogies are flawed because they are too simplistic. Kaplan and Norton's cockpit analogy would be more accurate if it included a multitude of tiny gremlins controlling wing flaps, fuel flow, and so on of a plane being buffeted by winds and generally struggling against nature, but with the gremlins always controlling information flow back to the cockpit instruments, for fear that the pilot might find gremlin replacements. It would not be surprising if airplanes guided this way occasionally flew into mountainsides when they seemed to be progressing smoothly toward their destinations.

Artful making differs from what we call industrial making. The principles of industrial making are so embedded in business thinking that they're transparent and we don't notice them. But, as we shall see, industrial methods can distort reality and smother innovation. Artful and industrial making are distinct approaches and each must be applied in the appropriate conditions.

The vast majority of difficult, important human problems -- both inside and outside organizations -- are not solved by a swift, decisive stroke from someone at the top. What usually matters are careful, thoughtful, small, practical efforts by people working far from the limelight.

Mitch Murray was writing songs. He came up with "How do you do it? How do you do what you do to me?" We listened to the demo and said, "It's a hit, George, but we've got a song, 'Love Me Do.'" George said, "I don't think yours is such a big hit." We said, "Yes, but it is us, and it is what we're about."

...but they were adamant, thank God, about not wanting this song they'd been given. On reflection, this was a huge stance because, as I say, for that bit of plastic you would sell your soul.

The complications of this diversity can be overwhelming. Ancient ethnic sores are belching fire while transnational companies linked by satellites conduct their business oblivious to the feudal past below.

The dirty little secret -- the fact often denied -- is that unlike the mythical epiphany, real creation is sloppy. Discovery is messy. Exploration is dangerous.

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

It's déjà vu all over again.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

You [the software developer] will need humility to recognize that the users are always the final and most appropriate judges of your work. Even though you're the expert in interpreting your users' comments and meeting their needs, their judgments of your work are final and without appeal.

No matter what the form, all art seems to produce a similar sensation -- of timelessness, of implicit order, of connectedness. It is as if the work of art had sounded some deep note, and caused sympathetic vibration in a hidden string, a string whose one end is secured in the human heart, and from there ascends towards some unknowable summit, the existence of the termination point affirmed only by the tautness of this resonant connection.

...a traditional ballad Sandy [Denny] had taught them [Fairport Convention] called 'A Sailor's Life'...turned English folk music on its head. The implications of their version of this old ballad have reverberated far and wide. A member of Los Lobos told a friend of mine that they had been just another rock band from East LA until 'A Sailor's Life' challenged them to find in their own Mexican traditions something as rich as Fairport had found in their English ones.

Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity?

Beneath the surface, the progressive sixties hid all manner of unpleasantness: sexism, reaction, racism and factionalism. It wasn't surprising, really. The idea that drugs, sex and music could transform the world was always a pretty naïve dream. As the counter-culture's effect on the mainstream grew, its own values and aesthetics decayed. The political setbacks of the coming years grabbed the headlines while the dilution of ideals happened more quietly, but nonetheless vividly for those who noticed.

There are many accounts of what happened next. Dylan left the stage with a shrug as the crowd roared. Having heard only three songs, they wanted 'moooooooooore', and some, certainly, were booing. They had been taken by surprise by the volume and aggression of the music. Some loved it, some hated it, most were amazed, astonished and energized by it. It was something we take for granted now, but utterly novel then: non-linear lyrics, an attitude of total contempt for expectation and established values, accompanied by screaming blues guitar and a powerful rhythm section, played at ear-splitting volume by young kids. The Beatles were still singing love songs in 1965 while the Stones played a sexy brand of blues-rooted pop. This was different. This was the Birth of Rock. So many taste crimes have been committed in rock's name since then that it might be questionable to count this moment as a triumph, but it certainly felt like one in July 1965.

Sitting in Princeteon listening to old records, we became obsessed with the past. We tried to pierce the veil of time and grasp what it sounded, felt, looked and smelled like. In Harvard Square and London I met many with similar preoccupations; they didn't seem unusual at all. When old blues singers began to reappear, it delivered a rush of excitement and adrenalin. Meeting and traveling with Gary Davis and Lonnie Johnson -- even Coleman Hawkins -- armoured me against a host of disappointments.

History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via Amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers -- or Nick Drake, for that matter -- doesn't equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced.

Thirty years after Brighton, I walked sadly away from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fair. It was everything my twenty-one-year-old self might have dreamed of: 75,000 people packed into the Fairgrounds, with NPR-subscriber bags holding expertly marked programmes. America's black musical heritage was on parade across two long weekends and eight stages. But the audience was almost entirely white. The performers had learned their lessons, dropping any modernizations or slick showbiz gestures and recreating the old-time styles the sophisticated audiences craved. On one level, it demonstrated respect for a deep culture and a rejection of shallow novelty. But removed from the soil in which it grew the music felt lifeless, like actors portraying characters who happened to be their younger selves. In two days wandering from stage to stage, I heard little I recognized as music.

I listened in the studio control room as musicians' modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything.... I suspect that the surge in cocaine's popularity explains -- at least in part -- why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.

These days most engineers confronted with a displeasing sound reach for the knobs on the console and tweak the high, mid or low frequencies. When that process is inflicted on more and more tracks of a multi-channel recording the sound passes through dozens of transistors, resulting in a narrower, more confined sound. With the added limitations of digital sound, you end up with a bright and shiny, thin and two-dimensional recording. To my ears anyway.

When John [Wood] heard a sound he didn't like, he would lift his bulky frame off the chair and lumber down the stairs, muttering all the way. I began to be able to predict whether he was going to try a different microphone, reposition the existing one or shift the offending musician to another part of the studio. When I listen to records we made together in the sixties, I can still hear the air in the studio and the full dimension of the sounds the musicians created for us. I can hear the depth of Nick Drake's breath as well as his voice, the grit in the crude strings of Robin Williamson's gimbri and Dave Mattacks' drum technique spread out warmly in aural Technicolor across the stereo spectrum.

The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven't enough money and time is at an even greater premium.... In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.

Friends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe.

I read an interview with Keith Richards once explaining how he and Mick Jagger had a single blues record between them when they met. It was one I knew well: a Stateside four-track EP licensed from the Excello label, with Slim Harpo on one side and Lazy Lester on the other. They played it until it was so worn they could barely hear the music through the scratches. One way of looking at the Stones' sound is as a South-East London adaptation of the Excello style. If they had owned more records, their music might have been less distinctive.

I have seen people enter pubs and bars where the Buena Vista Social Club CD is playing and look around for the source of the music; they seem startled to be entering a three-dimensional acoustic space. There were many recordings already on the market with similar Cuban singers and material when Buena Vista was released. Its success is usually ascribed to Cooder, the film or the brilliant marketing, all of which were certainly relevant. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important. Not only is it music from another era, magically preserved in the time capusule of Castro's communism, but was recorded using equally outdated techniques and painstakingly transferred to a digital master so that it retained as much of its analogue warmth as possible. The old Egrem studio in Havana is huge, an excellent but unforgiving room. Jerry [Boys], [Ry] Cooder and [Nick] Gold experimented a great deal with microphone placement. The recording captures the full sound of the three-dimensional space in which the musicians performed -- live. If it had been made at one of the new digital studios in Havana, trying so hard to be 'modern' with their tiny dead recording spaces and big control rooms, I doubt very much whether anyone beyond a few thousand Latin music enthusiasts would even know it existed.

The five years I spent making records in London saw huge leaps in technology. From the four tracks I began with, we went to eight, then sixteen, each increase doubling the tape's width. Just before I left for California came the beginning of the decline: some bright spark figured out how to squeeze twenty-four tracks on to the two-inch tape that previously held sixteen. The reduction in track width significantly degraded the sound quality. A few young engineers today realize how great two-inch sixteen-track recording sounds.

Adhere to the Principle of Least Astonishment. [This principle]... suggests you should avoid doing things that will surprise a user of your software.

One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions.

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.

Somehow, software development has evolved into the equivalent of a drive-through lane at a fast-food restaurant, where code is automatically generated without concern for the long-term system impact.

The typical, and primary, root cause of [the Nirvana] AntiPattern is the misguided notion that conflict is bad, and therefore should be avoided at all costs. In reality, conflict in the form of tension ... is a necessary part of any difficult task that involves intelligent people who care about their work.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Counterintuitively, employees already performing above average have the greatest room for growth. Great managers also know that it is hard work helping a talented person hone his talents. If a manager is preoccupied by the burden of transforming strugglers into survivors by helping them squeak above average, he will have little time left over for the truly difficult work of guiding the good towards the great.

Oh, there's a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

A mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ...The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism-- the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

There runs a strange law through the length of human history -- that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away. To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.

It's no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

...system architects act as storytellers. They keep alive the promise and vision of the future system, which is particularly valuable during the confusing early periods of a project.

Prototypes and prototyping are not substitutes for analysis and design, not excuses for sloppy thinking.

Developers who return again and again to their work, simplifying it and making it more general-purpose, produce smaller, simpler systems that deliver more to users.

Most user interface designers design screens, windows, and widgets; the best ones design user interface architectures.

Requirements are hard to understand and harder to specify. The wrong solution to this problem is to do a slipshod job of requirements specification, and rush ahead to design and code.... The right solution is to do whatever it takes to learn as many of the requirements as possible now. Do prototyping. Talk with more customers. Work for a month with a customer to get to know his or her job firsthand. Collect data. Do whatever it takes.

A critical aspect of all engineering disciplines is the elaboration of multiple approaches, trade-off analyses among them, and the eventual adoption of one. After requirements are agreed upon, you must examine a variety of architectures and algorithms.

If you do not pay enough attention to requirements, you endanger the project's success by introducing too much risk. If you pay too much attention to requirements, you overburden the project and raise the likelihood of being late and over-budget.

Furthermore, it is impossible for a consultant to walk into your office, examine a requirement, and tell you that it is either too detailed or too vague. The correct level of detail is completely dependent on the needs of the customer.

The bulleted list of requirements is by far the most cost-effective and beneficial approach. It is simple to create; it is simple to read, regardless of background; and, when stored in a spreadsheet, database, or requirements management tool and augmented with annotations, it has incredible benefits to project management.

The primary components of requirements management are requirements elicitation, requirements triage and requirements specification.

The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation. It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

There is probably no job on earth for which an ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast is more of a requirement than software project management. We are routinely expected to work ourselves into a state of believing in a deadline, a budget, or a performance factor that time subsequently may prove to be impossible.

When you find a project team that is focused on producing a standard document rather than on considering the content of that document, then you are in the land of the template zombies....

In the land of the template zombies, form takes precedence. It is not necessary to think about the content of the document. It is not really necessary to think at all. The important thing is to have something--anything--under each of the prescribed headings. Not surprisingly, template zombies are adept in the art of cutting and pasting and ignoring anything that does not fit the dictates of the template.

If you keep probing, and ask 'Precisely what is in the document? What is it for? Who uses it to make which decisions?' then you discover that people do not know why. They are producing the document because it is the next thing to do.

If you recognize this behavior on your project, you may be working in a paper mill.

In a paper mill, every activity is marked by the production of a document, and progress is measured by how many of the documents have been produced--not by what the documents contain. The paper mill principle says: Just in case anyone needs anything, let's give everbody everything.

First, he writes down the question on a blackboard or a yellow pad of paper.

Next, he thinks real hard....

Then, he writes down the answer.

One Nobel Prize winner describing the process another, Richard Feynman, used to solve the most difficult scientific problems

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints.

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving....

...the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

Every Body cries, a Union is absolutely necessary, but when they come to the Manner and Form of the Union, their weak Noddles are perfectly distracted.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Regarding Jobs' legendary product vision, Gates said, "I would give a lot to have Steve's taste. In terms of intuitive taste for people and products, I sat in Mac product reviews...and look at it as an engineering question. I see Steve make decisions based on people and products--it's magical."

We are constantly reminded that just doing things to get ISO 9000 certification or CMM levels is not enough. You have to take the underlying intent seriously. You have to make getting a result uppermost, not getting a certificate.

Briefly: software must be conceived of as something far broader than program code. It must at least include all design specifications, user documentation, data, test cases, codes and human interfaces.

Fact 37: Rigorous inspections can remove up to 90% of errors from a software product before the first test case is run.

We urgently need to stabilise and reduce human numbers. There is no way that a population of nine billion -- the UN's medium forecast for 2050 -- can meet its energy needs without unacceptable damage to the planet and a great deal of human misery. We need to think about climate changers -- human beings and their numbers -- as well as climate change. It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.

The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.

Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wrangle yourself out another to take its place.

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

In short, the software designer must learn to think like a communicator and to practice an artistic craft as well as an engineering one.

Traditional rigorous methodologies, and software engineering in general, focus on architecture, requirements and design; coding and testing are considered low-value 'construction' activities. In these methodologies, the high-leverage activities are the up-front activities. Agilists reverse this emphasis.

The Repeatable Process has one important strength that the Initial Process does not: It provides control over the way the organization establishes its plans and commitments.

When asked to name their key problems, few software professionals even mention technology. Their major concerns are open-ended requirements, uncontrolled change, arbitrary schedules, insufficient test time, inadequate training, and unmanaged system standards.

Another myth is the widespread belief that some technologically advanced tool or method will provide a magic answer to the software crisis. This is not only wrong, but it is dangerous.

A common misperception is that we must start with firm requirements. There is a widespread but fallacious view that requirements are the customers' job and that development should not start until they are explicitly defined. The fact is that the demand for firm and unchanging requirements is mostly wishful thinking....

Talented people are the most important element in any software organization.

Trying to change the behavior of software engineers is like herding cats. They are very independent people; they all have their own ideas, and they won't tell you what they think, particularly if they disagree with you. They just do what they want to do.

It's far too rarely stated that the technology industry is not in the business of making people productive. It is only in the business of selling more technology. Granted, some companies make better tools than others, and users can be productive with some of today's tools. But in the technology business, users' productivity is secondary to profitability. No matter what a company claims, feature lists and upgrades are designed for the company's success, not the users'.

And your remarks on the text," Mr. Gott declared, "are merely a muddle.

Yes, Gott," said Mike meekly.

You see, Mike, you haven't any brain really.

No, of course not," said Mike.

You must just keep to the cackle and write nicely. You write very nicely.

Yes," said Mike, dubiously.

Keep off thinking things out, and you'll do well. In fact, you'll go far.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them....

Good design doesn't simply happen as an afterthought. You must make it your most passionate goal. You have to set up a managerial process that values design, resolves the issues it raises, and then has the guts to carry the design through. You do this by making a shift in your company--a Simplicity Shift.

Simplicity goes beyond a term like 'good user interface,' which has become so broad, it has little clear meaning. Simplicity is a goal with precision. Simplicity means streamlining, pruning clutter, cleaning up presentation, and improving the initial experience with a product. But Simplicity is more than just making a cute product for technophobes. Simplicity streamlines and optimizes use, as well.

In talking about Simplicity to others, I've found the standard definition of what a user interface is no longer works. We are trapped by the current definition. In fact, I've finally come to the conclusion that user interfaces don't exist. Or, at least, they don't exist in the same way we talk about them. The term user interface implies a single object, a bit of code, which represents everything the user can do with a product. This is misleading and dangerous, because it limits your thinking, analysis and planning about how to design a commercial product.

We need a richer set of words to enable us greater explorations of problems and solutions. I suggest three separate layers ultimately compose the entire user experience: The Presentation layer, the Task layer, and the Infrastructure layer.

Jobs: What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.

Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you you're wrong?

Jobs: (laughs) Yeah.

Mossberg: I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean people that work for…

Jobs: Oh, yeah, no we have wonderful arguments.

Mossberg: And do you win them all?

Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don't stay.

Mossberg: But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas.

Jobs: I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn't?

Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.

Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices… that need to be even easier to use than a PC, that need to be even more intuitive than a PC; and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

We think we are on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon but in the organization to build these kinds of products.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop.... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem -- and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That's what we wanted to do with Mac.

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

Research overwhelmingly supports the notion that satisfied employees are 'in the know.' They want to be trusted with the truth about the business, including its challenges and downturns. Managers who trust their employees with the truth are trusted, in turn, by their employees. It's a powerful, positive cycle.

Perhaps the greatest cognitive barrier we face in making sense of the world is that we have come to view certain realities as part of a "natural order" that will remain unchallenged. In fact, many "fundamental truths" that we take for granted are simply the fragile constructs of history and could shift radically in the decade ahead.

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

I have to program because of the aesthetics of it. I love to see the way it fits together and sort of sings to you.

Just as possessing a rich vocabulary of words enables you to write well, possessing a rich vocabulary of design patterns enables you to design well.

The following is an exhaustive list ofall problem-solving techniques, arranged in order of decreasing effectiveness:

1. Already knowing the solution;

2. Already knowing the solution to a similar problem;

3. All other techniques.

The third -- enormous -- category lumps functional decomposition together with whacks on the side of the head, thinking outside the box, and all the others because, compared to the first two techniques, they are nearly worthless.

I was always slightly disappointed with all the performers I saw, from Little Richard to Jerry Lee. They never sound exactly like their records. I like "Whole Lotta Shakin'," the 1956 take on the record, but I'm not interested in a variation on the theme. When Gene Vincent did "Be Bop A Lula" in Hamburg, he didn't do it the same. It was a thrill to meet Gene Vincent and see him, but it was not "Be Bop A Lula." I'm a record fan.

Your goals [when designing a system] shouldn't be to achieve perfection. They should be to create as small a system as you can that works usefully and is built to be extensible.

Good missions, and Mission Statements, exclude alternatives. Useless ones try to express everything you might ever want to do.

We develop or install high-quality software , has no place in a Mission Statement, for example, because what other choice might you have expressed? The alternatives:

We develop or install mediocre software.

We develop or install awful software.

We refuse to develop or install any kind of software.

We d really like to develop and install software, only we ve forgotten how.

All are non-starters. Because the only statement you can make about software is that it will be high quality, don t waste the paper and toner.

Simplicity and ease of use are cornerstones for Java and help explain why take-up on the language has been so swift. The world is now putting C++ aside as it migrates to Java. Those MIS organizations that never detoured into C++ can now leapfrog it entirely and retool their COBOL programmers for the world of network-centric computing.

Despite its importance, computer programming remains a black art to most people, and that is hardly surprising. Software, after all, is almost totally invisible. It cannot be touched, felt, heard, smelled, or tasted. But software is what makes a computer do anything useful, interesting or entertaining.

The difference, [Fred] Brooks said, was that the languages and operating systems with fanatical fan clubs were "originally designed to satisfy a designer or a very small group of designers." Whereas the successful products unable to inspire fan clubs, he noted, were "designed to satisfy a large set of requirements" -- they were "done inside of product processes." So, Brooks asked, "What does that tell us about product processes?" His answer: "They produce serviceable things, but not great things."

The desire to treat software more like its hardware siblings began in earnest in the 1960s. Equal treatment was one motivation, at least at the start, but it was also an effort to make programming a more structured discipline like hardware engineering. Looking back, [David] Sayre observed that the Bald Peak conference had the regrettable effect of beginning a management mentality that served to "rigidify" programming at IBM. In the early days, he recalled that programming at IBM had an informal Silicon Valley flavor, which tended to encourage innovation. By the late 1960s, the working environment had become much more regimented. The disciplines of hardware engineering fit uneasily in the more ethereal realm of software. "Software is a much more plastic object than hardware," Sayre said. "You whip it up, squeeze it, and you can dream."

In 1983, when he [Ken Thompson] and [Dennis] Richie won the Turing award, which has been called the Nobel prize of computer science, Thompson explained, "I am a programmer. On my 1040 form, that is what I put down as my occupation." He has called programming an addiction of sorts, and it was in the Berkeley computer center that he got hooked. Sitting in the Bell Labs offices years later, he described the appeal as having all the craftsman's satisfactions of making things, without the cost and trouble of procuring the materials. "It's like building something where you don't have to order the cement," Thompson said. "You create a world of your own, your own environment, and you never leave this room."

The act of delegation is a slippery slope for managers. Yes, you want to figure out how not to be a bottleneck in your organization and, yes, you want to figure out how to scale, but you also want to continue to get your hands dirty. Members Only's problem was he believed his job was purely strategic. Think big thoughts; delegate the results of those thoughts to minions. He was a pure delegator and he'd forgotten how to do real work.

Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organizations.

As a manager, you are responsible for making great decisions and the best way to do that is to involve as much of the team as possible in every decision.

Your team is collectively smarter than you simply because there are more of them. More importantly, by including them in the decision process and creating a team where they feel they can say no, you're creating trust.

With smaller teams doing more for less, removing yourself from the code strikes me as a bad career move. Even in a monstrous company laded with policy, process, and politics, you can't forget how to develop software. And how to develop software is changing. Now. Right under your feet, this very second.

How in the world are you going to scale if you're slowly forgetting how software is made?

I'm happy you're about to confuse your team by swimming in the developer pool. The simple fact is that well-defined roles in software development are fading.

Everybody is talking to everybody else and they're learning from each other's mistakes ... and there's no reason that a manager shouldn't be participating in this massive global cross-pollination....

Besides, you want to be a part of a team of interchangeable parts. Not only does this make your team more nimble, it presents each person with the opportunity to see the product and the company from a vastly different perspective.

Once-a-week meetings are a study in futility because folks forget everything during the course of a weekend and meetings end up rehashing the same thoughts from the week before.

Our current lack of respect for the swing can be likened to the current state of our democracy. Balance is required to maintain something as delicate as democracy, a subtle understanding of how your power can be magnified through joining with and sharing the power of another person. When that is no longer understood, it becomes a battle to see who is the strongest, who is the loudest, who can get the most attention.

The originators of jazz were only two generations removed from slavery. They were victims of rigorous forms of segregation that routinely and institutionally denied their humanity. So freedom was much more than a word to them. These pioneering musicians were exuberant about exhibiting this newfound personal freedom through their art. But they were also excited about hearing other people do the same thing. They understood that all were inextricably linked in freedom, just as they had been inextricably linked in bondage. And it wasn't theory; it was life as they lived it.

The best jazz had always been the embodiment of integrity and conviction. Because the musicians' skills and competence were so hard-earned, it was difficult to get them to compromise. Once jazzmen began making the decision to water down their artistry for notoriety, publicity, or money, our art began to face the same challenges that our government and many businesses face: dearth of leadership, lack of quality, loss of meaning, insensitivity to people--ultimately a wholesale loss of faith: 'Well, what is jazz, anyway?''What difference does it make what I play?'

Kids tell me, 'I want to move the art form forward.' I tell them to get a stack of CDs, put them in a car, and take them from here to wherever they consider to be forward, because the art form is not going anywhere. You can make your contributions to it and they will be whatever they are. You will perhaps come up with some things that no one has come up with before, and those things will add beauty and substance to the art form. But you are not going to move it anywhere.

Swing--the dance and the music--bespeaks the flexible nature of American life. In jazz, the bass walks a note on every beat. The drummer rides the cymbal or plays brushes on every beat. And everybody else invents melodies and sounds that sway with, against, and upside every beat. Every beat requires musicians to reassess their relationships to one another. This is what makes swinging so challenging. You are forced to be constantly aware of other people's feelings.

Jazz is the most flexible art form ever because it believes in the good taste of individuals. It believes in our ability to make reasonable choices. It takes a chance on our decision-making skills instead of legislating our freedom away with written restrictions and restrictive hierarchies. In jazz, the size of your heart and your ability to play determine your position in the band. The philosophy of jazz is rooted in the elevation and enrichment of people, plain ol' folks.

When I started learning about jazz, I wasn't into any kind of art. I had no idea it could have a practical purpose. Now, more than thirty years later, I testify to the power of art, and more specifically jazz, to improve your life--and keep on improving it.

Jazz insists on the undisputed sovereignty of the human being. In this technological era we can easily be fooled into believing that sophisticated machines are more important than progressive humanity. That's why art is an important barometer of identity. The arts let us know who we are in all of our glory, reveal the best of who we are. All the political and financial might in the world is diminished when put to the service of an impoverished cultural agenda. We see it in our schools, in our homes, and in our world profile: rich and fat, lazy and morally corrupt, with wild, out-of-control young people.

We all know that civilization requires a supreme effort. Our technology will become outmoded, but the technology of the human soul does not change.

That's why these were still confident, optimistic men. Even though they were broke and misunderstood, sometimes difficult of personality, sometimes impaired by a too-intense encounter with mind-altering substances and trapped in a culture that was rapidly moving away from professional levels of musicianship, romantic expression, and the arts in general, they still believed in the value of this jazz they played and still understood that their job was inventing music--and making sense of it with one another.

It's a labor of love for all of us. It's not contrived or fake and it's not about money (it's too much work to be about money). It's about the love of what we are doing. That's the center of what it is about, and that's the center of what anything of great human value is always about. It's about that love that you have for humanity in our commonality. And to experience all of the things that are in this music like heartbreak and joy and many other things -- a certain type of striving and struggle -- it's a part of the life we all live together.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their way, lead their lives, without art.

Plot, plan, calculate or postulate as we may, there will always be surprises in store for us. Count on it!

If some problem occurs in one-piece flow manufacturing then the whole production line stops. In this sense it is a very bad system of manufacturing. But when production stops everyone is forced to solve the problem immediately. So team members have to think, and through thinking team members grow and become better team members and people.

One fact recurs repeatedly in all of this research: the key managerial processes are enormously complex and mysterious..., drawing on the vaguest of information and using the least articulated of mental processes. These processes seem to be more relational and holistic than ordered and sequential, and more intuitive than intellectual; they seem to be most characteristic of right-hemispheric activity.

No Toyota leader has ever assumed that lean sustains itself. On the contrary, the company's leaders intuitively understand that the natural evolution of a culture will atrophy and deteriorate unless its leaders are continually renewing and passing the DNA to others.

Only by adding new energy... can you maintain or improve a system. Leaders are the primary source of energy; they arrest the atrophy of lean tools and keep them thriving and evolving in the culture. It is they who can sustain lean thinking.

Unfortunately, many modern-day engineering managers believe their role in an organization is to attend meetings, keep abreast of the latest organizational policies, make the tough decisions about the big problems in the company, and generally look upward and outward. The philosophy seems to be that a good manager is good at delegating, and good engineers should work autonomously.

In the United States, 'nosing around' is being a busy body. It is a form of micromanagement. An effective manager should delegate and then stay out of the engineer's way. For a Toyota manager, this is abdicating responsibility. How can you consult and advise if you do not know what is going on? If you have no more information about what is going on across the organization than any other engineer, then what is your value?

Most organizations use some form of the matrix system to determine who is reporting to whom and what respective roles and responsibilities will be. In most organizations, the matrix is a communications nightmare that spawns mixed allegiance and conflict between and among different parts of the organization. Toyota also uses a matrix, but the program boss is the chief engineer. The CE is ultimately the one person charged with the success of the design, development and sale of a car. The CE's ultimate responsibility is delivering value to the customer. While Toyota also emphasizes teamwork, there is always one person who is accountable for the success of the team. For product development, this person is the CE.

Quality matters, and much of the evidence suggests that while developing countries are encouraging and fostering meritocracy, their Western rivals are increasingly approaching academe with an egalitarian flare -- more access (of course, with the benefit of widening educational opportunity) even if at the expense of quality.

The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.

Intranet maintenance should be seen as a regular part of everybody's job; it's the part of the job that ensures that others can benefit from what you have done.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

Most needed are those 'third places' which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase 'third places' derives from considering our homes to be the 'first' places in our lives, and our work places the 'second.'

...note that this implicit recognition of the right-side traits by the excellent companies is directly at the expense of more traditional left-brain business practices: causes to fight for are a long way from thirty quarterly MBO objectives. The intimate team or small division ignores scale economies. Allowing freedom of expression by thousands of quality circles flies in the face of the 'one best way' of traditional production organization.

The message that comes through so poignantly in the studies we reviewed is that we like to think of ourselves as winners. The lesson that the excellent companies have to teach is that there is no reason why we can't design systems that continually reinforce this notion; most of their people are made to feel that they are winners. Their populations are distributed around the normal curve, just like every other large population, but the difference is that their systems reinforce degrees of winning rather than degrees of losing.

One of the puzzling aspects of 'waterfall' development is the idea that knowledge, in the form of 'requirements,' exists prior to and separate from coding. Software development is a knowledge-creating process. While an overall architectural concept will be sketched out prior to coding, the validation of that architecture comes as the code is being written. In practice, the detailed design of software always occurs during coding, even if a detailed design document was written ahead of time.

The most fundamental lean measurement is cycle time: how long--on the average--does it take to go from concept to cash or from customer order to deployed software? This single measurement provides a system-level gauge of your process capability. In addition, it exposes every waste in the system: Every missing skill, weak capability, and defective implementation increases cycle time.

The objective of a development organization is to first of all establish a repeatable, reliable cycle time for each classification of work, and then to reduce that cycle time through continuous improvement. This single measurement drives all manner of good behavior in every area of the organization, because it aligns everyone in making the right tradeoffs.

We need to adopt the attitude that the internal structure of a system will require continuous improvement as the system evolves. Refactoring -- improving the design as the system develops -- is not just for commercial software. Without continuous improvement, any software system will suffer. Internal structures will become calcified and fragile. In a surprisingly short time, the system will cease to be useful.

Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.

The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard ... at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn't fly apart in confusion, but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.

Jenny said when she was just about five years old,
You know, "My parents are going to be the death of us all."

"Two TV sets and two Cadillac cars, well you know,
It ain't going to help me at all (not just a tiny bit)."

Then one fine morning she turns on a New York station,
She doesn't believe what she hears at all.

She started dancing to that fine, fine music,
You know her life was saved by rock and roll.

Grandpa: Penny why don't you write a play about ism-mania?

Penny: Ism-mania?

Grandpa: Yeah, sure, you know -- communism, fascism, voodooism. Everybody's got an ism these days.

Penny: I feel like I've got this itch or something.

Grandpa: It's just as catching. When things go a little bad nowadays, you go out and get yourself an ism and you're in business.

Penny: I've got it! It might help Cynthia to have an ism in the monastery!

Grandpa: It might at that. Only give her Americanism. Let her know something about Americans: John Paul Jones, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Edison, Mark Twain. When things got tough for those boys, they didn't run around looking for isms. Lincoln said, "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Nowadays they say, "Think the way I do, or I'll bomb the daylights out of you."

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.

The requirements analyst has to inject something new into the process: his vision of what the product might be. In other words, the requirements are not simply the passive interpretation of an existing piece of work, but contain inventions that will make the work easier, better, more interesting and more pleasant.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatics to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins.

On the basis of all the evidence, the closest relative of the human proves to be the chimp. The closest relative of the chimp is the human. Not orangs, but people. Us. Chimps and humans are nearer kin than are chimps and gorillas or any other kinds of ape not of the same species.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.

The most powerful learning comes from direct experience. But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.

The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. "I am George Bodenheimer," he said to Jobs. "I run ESPN." Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than "Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard," then turned and walked away.

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

We see therefore that all the notions whereby the common people are wont to explain Nature are merely modes of imagining and denote not the nature of anything but only the constitution of the imagination.

Since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where the freedom of judgment is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I think I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In too many programming organizations, every time there's a design debate, nobody ever manages to make a decision, usually for political reasons. So the programmers only work on uncontroversial stuff. As time goes on, all the hard decisions are pushed to the end. These projects are the most likely to fail.

OK, I didn't tell you the most important part--how do you know whether to hire someone?

In principle, it's simple. You're looking for people who are

1. Smart

2. Get things done

That's it. That's all you're looking for.

At this point, I'm in the middle of a very long conversation with my audience.

It's an ongoing dialogue about what living means. You create a space together. You are involved in an act of the imagination together, imagining the life you want to live, the kind of country you want to live in, the kind of place you want to leave to your children. What are the things that bring you ecstasy and bliss, what are the things that bring on the darkness, and what can we do together to combat those things? That's the dialogue I have in my imagination when I'm writing. I have it in front of me when I'm performing.

The trick in keeping bands together is always the same: 'Hey, asshole, the guy standing next to you is more important than you think he is.'

Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a member of the investigating board, believes that the Columbia tragedy and the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster resulted from the same mindset, saying: '(NASA) managers...did not grab onto this problem and insist on an answer. It was really quite the opposite. They assumed they knew the answer. They assumed the foam was not going to be a problem. And they were insisting that people disprove the preconception they had.'

The embarrassment is that I'm given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does.

The blend of corporate mysticism and transcendental consumerism he [Tom Peters] offers has its roots planted in the pragmatic, optimistic, can-do American work ethic. But, like the Taylorist philosophy from which it springs, it is also a work ethic gone mad. It begins with the idea that work can be meaningful and stretches it to the point where there is no meaning outside work. It becomes a deluded form of optimism, a feverish activity that masks an underlying anxiety about the meaning of life, a form of self-alienation so complete that the self disappears entirely into its consumer preferences and transactions.

The more important lesson to draw from the gurus' underwhelming record is not that they fail to see into the future, but that they are in a certain sense behind the times. If there is one idea that unites the gurus, paradoxically, it is that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. If you want to succeed, they howl in unison, you must break with the pack. But the guru literature itself is the pack. True to their calling as mass entertainers, they are followers rather than leaders.

The time has come to recognize that higher education in management rests on a fatal fallacy. The idea behind the contemporary business school is that preparing future business managers means training them in a discipline called Business Management. After 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce such a discipline, it should be clear that it does not exist. Preparing managers to manage, in fact, is not different from preparing people to live in a civilized world. Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated. And for that purpose, although a certain amount of study of business-related subjects may prove useful, the business schools as they are presently constituted are at best superfluous.

"Customer satisfaction" is a good way to sell shoes; but it is a bad way to relieve ignorance. It is fundamentally stupid to base the content of an education on what the as-yet uneducated person decides is best.

In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto 'A word is worth a thousand pictures.' This still holds true.

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

Often, but apparently inaccurately, attributed to Petronius Arbiter

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

I never hesitated to promote someone I didn't like. The comfortable assistant, the nice guy you like to go on fishing trips with, is a great pitfall. Instead I looked for those sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who see and tell you about things as they really are. If you can get enough of them around you and have patience enough to hear them out, there is no limit to where you can go.

Over the years, executives have backed their desire to eliminate programmers with staggering funds. Dozens of simplistic schemes have been heaped with money and praise on the promise -- as yet not kept -- of going directly from a sales proposal to a working data-processing system. Their touching faith in the magic of technology should serve as inspiration to those of us who daily bend our backs to the programmer's burden. Perhaps their wishes -- though they can surely never be fulfilled -- should give us pause -- make us lift our noses from the coding pad or the terminal -- and consider this human activity of ours from a human point of view.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell'd. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs -- of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history -- deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.

My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all of the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.

And whatever we mean by the word 'spirit' -- let us just say, with Tillich, that it involves for each of us our ultimate concern -- it is in that simple awestruck moment when great art enters you and changes you, that spirit shines in this world just a little more brightly than it did the moment before.

During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world's cultures are now available to us.

...for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us--the knowledge, experience, wisdom and reflection of all major human civilizations--premodern, modern and postmodern--are open to study by anyone.

To grasp what is involved with levels or stages, let's use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not yet been socialized into the culture's ethics and conventions: this is called the preconventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant's awareness is largely self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learns its culture's rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child's particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual's identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.

Thus, moral development tends to move from 'me' (egocentric) to 'us' (ethnocentric) to 'all of us' (worldcentric)--a good example of the unfolding waves of consciousness.

Let me start with a short and simple list. This is not the last word on the topic, but the first word, a simple list of suggestions to get the conversation going. Most of the great wisdom traditions agree that:

1. Spirit, by whatever name, exists.

2. Spirit, although existing out there, is found in here, or revealed within to the open heart and mind.

3. Most of us don't realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality -- that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.

4. There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to our liberation.

5. If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which

6. marks the end of sin and suffering, and

7. manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.

Does a list something like that make sense to you? Because if there are these general spiritual patterns in the cosmos, at least wherever human beings appear, then this changes everything. You can be a practicing Christian and still agree with that list; you can be a practicing Neopagan and still agree with that list.

An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above.

An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let's get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development — but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one's awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don't, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.

If you are talking to me about your new car, you are the first person, I am the second person, and the car is the third person. These pronouns actually represent three perspectives that human beings can take when they talk about the world or attempt to know the world.... The fascinating part is that these three perspectives might actually give rise to art, morals, and science. Or the Beautiful, the Good, and the True: the Beauty that is in the eye (or the I) of the beholder; the Good or moral actions that can exist between you and me as a we; and the objective Truth about third-person objects (or its) that you and I might discover: hence, art (I), morals (we), and science (it).

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured -- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.

[David] Susskind invited Phil Spector to the Open End television program one evening to 'talk about the record business.' Suddenly Susskind and 'William B.' [Williams], station WNEW's old-nostalgia disc jockey, were condemning Spector as some kind of sharpie poisoning American culture.... Susskind and Williams kept throwing Spector's songs at him.... And Susskind sits there on the show reading one of Spector's songs out loud, no music, just reading the words, from the Top Sixty or whatever it is, 'Fine Fine Boy,' to show how banal rock'n roll is. The song just keeps repeating 'He's a fine fine boy.' So Spector starts drumming on the big coffee table there with the flat of his hands in time to Susskind's voice and says, 'What you're missing is the beat.'

"Creating ever more value for customers with ever fewer resources" is ... all I have ever meant by "lean".

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

With the exception of a few hysterical CASE vendors and religious zealots, most software professionals would agree that there is no single silver bullet that will exorcise our software demons.

The SEI's Process Maturity Model may have some flaws, but it is a good map and is becoming widely accepted. Until you can find a better map, this one sure beats wandering through the forest in the dark.