| WISDOM
IN WORDS |
Alteration
“In greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude of mind.”
— William James, publisher
Rule
“I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don’t treat me right - shame on you!”
— Louis Armstrong, musician
Simplicity
“Think of other people. Serve other people sincerely. No cheating.....”
— Dalai Lama, religious leader
Rebound
“Succeeding in adversity makes success all the sweeter. At the end of the day, it’s not how far you fall but how high you bounce.”
— Sheila Wellington, president
Necessity
“I had no money! I had to make a profit from the start.”
— Jeff Hock, founder, winesby.com
Advancement
“Don’t assume that your people want a promotion. Talk to them, get to know them, ask them what they hope to achieve at work. If your guru programmer won’t thrive as a manager, don’t promote him up the ladder. Instead, make a hero out of him. Put him on a pedestal and make him a superstar that other employees can admire.”
— Debora Wilson, president and ceo
weather.com
Doing good
“Investment advice aside, I'm a big believer that those who do good do well—in any economy. Simply put, the storekeeper who offers how prices and top quality will draw more customers and best his competitors. The employer who focuses on giving employees better opportunities and benefits will attract and retain talent. If you’re genuinely enthusiastic about helping people, you ‘ll rise above these difficult times—and be better off for it.”
— Sir John Marks Templeton, chairman, John Templeton Foundation |
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| Insight in Humor
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The chairman speaks
Alan Greenspan, the powerful chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has developed a reputation for his verbal style and almost matches his fame for finances. Greenspan seems to rely combination of irony, grammatical sophistication, and obfuscation that both impresses people and makes them furious. He certainly knows this, and sometimes even jokes about it himself.
“I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.” “I am trying to think of a way to answer that question by putting more words into fewer ideas than I usually do.”
“I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
— Adapted from Greenspan, by Justin Martin (Perseus Publishing). |
| A command of the obvious |
Ms. Jones hired a new person who had little experience and no references to answer the phones, but who took the job for an incredibly low salary. “After all,” thought Ms. Jones, “the duties are easy to learn.”
The new person took the first call, laughed, and said “It certainly is,” and hung up. She did the same thing with the next call. Finally Ms. Jones asked what was going on. “Well,” said the new hire, “the same person keeps calling up to tell me that ‘It’s long distance from New York’—as if I didn’t know it was over a thousand miles!”
— Adapted from Your Own Joke Book, compiled by Gertrude Crampton (Scholastic Book Services) |
| Employment history |
| After writer Nelson Algren won the National Book Award in 1950 for his novel the Man with the Golden Arm, he was invited to go to Hollywood to work on the screenplay. Although the film became a sensation because of its depiction of drug addiction. Algren’s tenure as a screenwriter was short. As he ironically described it, “I worked Monday and I got fired Wednesday. The man who hired me was out of town Tuesday.”
— Adapted from Barlett’s Book of Anecdotes (Little, Brown and Company). |
| Selective memory |
A business owner called in Wilson, his top executive, and told her, “I’m going out of my head with worry over our falling profits. I’m so distraught I don’t know what to do. If you can get revenues back up, I’ll promote you to company president.”
Ms. Wilson got busy over the rest of the year and worked wonders in turning the company around. At the beginning of the following year, she went in to see the owner, and said, “Are you satisfied with our progress over the last seven months?”
“I certainly am,” said the owner. “Then what about your promise that I would become company president if I relieved your worry about our performance?”
“What do you mean? Surely I didn’t say that?! Now you can see how out of my head I was!”
— Adapted from Accent on Humor, edited by Patricia Nash (Philanthropic Service for Institutions). |
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