"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."

"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 humann 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."

"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."

"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."

"...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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"...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."

"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

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

"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."

"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."

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine."

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

"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."