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Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Admit to yourself, "I am not indispensable." Repeat over and over. Most people don't want to admit this. Most people are wrong.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

Every sustained wave of technological progress and economic development everywhere has been fueled by greed, profiteering, special privileges, and megalomania.

There is a basic truth about what a human needs in order to survive; our culture seems unable to understand that. Human nature survives and has survived through the ages by being able to hold on tenaciously to two concepts: What is there about my life or world that has remained constant? and What is there about my life or world that has changed or is changing? I have always argued that change becomes stressful or overwhelming only when you've lost any sense of the constancy in your life. You need firm ground to stand on. From there, you can deal with that change. Observing the constants in your life gives you that firm ground. The thing about the great faiths is that they talk about what's constant in the world: God, grace, prayer. But our culture, in general -- and the profession of career counseling, in particular -- gets absorbed with a single question: What's changing? Nobody remembers to ask the other question, What's remained constant?

Schedule is how we make our intentions manifest in the world.

First-line managers should operate the company. Directors should coach the managers and spend an equal amount of time working with their counterpart directors in other functional areas to ensure that each piece of the business is productive and profitable. Vice presidents should coach the directors and spend the majority of their time defining and developing the company as it will need to be in three to five years. When everyone focuses only on the day-to-day, the opportunity cost from embedded unprofitability and failure to position the company for the future is enormous.

In business, unlike in nature, the fittest often survive by helping create the environment that favors them.

Reality is what we pay attention to, but measurement requires classification and classification requires abstraction. By paying attention to abstractions, we grasp the generic, but only at the expense of understanding the particular. This means that we lose the smell, feel, and touch of what’s going on right here, right now. And with that loss of the sensual, we lose our ability to respond quickly to events as they happen.