Who is a Professional?

Who is a professional? Someone who has a precise understanding of his current knowledge and capabilities, and yet always remains highly motivated when performing his duties. That's a professional.

Taken from an NHK (Japan) TV program about professional occupations; in this case, an airline pilot.

Chinese Calculus

"The Chinese are kicking our butts in everything. If this was China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."
— PA governor Ed Rendell, on postponement of Eagles game due to blizzard

Because Americans can't walk in a snow storm and do calculus at the same time. ;)

Pericles

"The brilliance of the present is the glory of the future stored up for ever in the memory of man."

-- Pericles, Final Speech to the Athenians (430 BCE) as recorded by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:64 (Rex Warner translation)

The Fall of the American Republic

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
-- Anonymous

I was unaware of this quotation until a few days ago when I read it in the back of a magazine. I find it of interest, even though the provenance of the quotation is very much in doubt (see below). The second half of the first paragraph, where the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, strikes me as the cornerstone of Republican fiscal policy, originating with the "voodoo economics" of Reagan's supply-side economics through McCain's "Bush-Plus" budget plan. One wonders when a Republican will "go the distance" and make the suggestion to eliminate taxes altogether.

Personally, I think that American culture currently falls somewhere between "from complacency to apathy" and "from apathy to dependence."

Note: The above quotation is old, but apparently not as old as it is often attributed. Most people have attributed it to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (1747-1813), a Scottish attorney and writer, although it has been attributed to several other men as well. Research suggests that the quotation is relatively modern; it first began to be published back in the '50s; however, no one has been able to determine who the real author(s) is/are. (As a result, I've attributed the quotation to "Anonymous.")

For several interesting discussions on the quotation, see:

Snopes.com: The Fall of the Athenian Republic

The Mythical Alexander Tyler and His Theory of Democracy

The Truth About Tytler

Aphorisms on Success

Last week, I attended a seminar located at the Mid Valley Cititel Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Their complementary notepaper had five aphorisms on the topic of success that I thought was worth sharing:

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they start a winning game."

"If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory."

"To make it to the top, you've got to want it with all your heart."

"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of chosen field of endeavor."

"The secret of success is consistency of purposes."

The More Things Change... Hermann Goering

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-- Hermann Goering
(1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich. April 18, 1946

Source: Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert (an Allied appointed psychologist), who visited daily with Goering and his cronies in their cells, afterwards making notes and ultimately writing the book about these conversations. (Source)

The More Things Change... The American Fascist

Pop quiz, hotshot. Who said the following and when?

"The really dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Admit it, this could very well apply to today's situation. In fact, it was said by then-Vice President Henry Wallace, published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944. The more things change...

The Customer is Always...?

Tom Peters had a post about a banner found at the Hua Xin Li Dress Co., Ltd. in China (Slogan from the Godless Commies ...). One person, who left a comment on the blog, listed a few of his (or her) favorite quotations on customers. I thought these were worth sharing:

"If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful." - Jeff Bezos.

"I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer." - Richard Branson

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates

"In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity." - Azim Premji

"Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community." - Sam Walton

"It helps a ton when you learn people's names and don't butcher them when trying to pronounce them." - Jerry Yang

"Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business." - Zig Ziglar

It's sort of ironic that I should find this list of quotations today as I had a really terrible experience waiting in line at the bank during my lunch hour. Extremely slow service (and not for the first time). This bank (UOB) needs its tellers to get some additional training in customer service and queue management.

USQ Aphorisms

The school I teach at is affiliated with the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Australia. One thing I like about USQ's books is that they have a number of aphorisms on the front and back covers. I thought I'd share them with you:

Front Cover:

• "He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower." - Mary Howitt
  
• "Engineering is the art or science of making practical." - S.C. Florman
  
• "The arts are the servant; wisdom its master." - Seneca
  
• "Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one's being." - Orison Swett Marden
  
• "To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe." - Marilyn vos Savant
  
• "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." - Confucius
  
• "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." - Ellen Parr
  
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
  
• "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." - Jules de Gaultier
  
• "Wear the old coat and buy the new book." - Austin Phelps
  
• "Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." - Sir Winston Churchill
  
• "Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival." - W. Edwards Deming
  
• "There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness." - Franz Kafka
  
• "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
  
• "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastophe." - H.G. Wells
  
• "It is only the ignorant who despise education." - Publilius Syrus
  
• "Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life." - Dr. David M. Burns
  
• "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." - Carl Jung
  

Back Cover:

• "Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism." - William Phillips
  
• "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  
• "Intelligence without ambition is like a bird without wings." - C. Archie Danielson
  
• "The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television." - Andrew Ross
  
• "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
  
• "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
  
• "I think we're here to learn and evolve, and the pursuit of knowledge alleviates the pain of being human." - Sting
  
• "The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." - Allan K. Chamlers
  
• "Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
• "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." - Antonie de Saint-Exupery, "The Little Prince"
  
• "One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star." - G.K. Chesterton
  
• "Read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." - Francis Bacon
  
• "All of us have two educations: one which we receive from others; another, and the most valuable, which we give ourselves" - John Randolph
  
• "Knowledge comes by taking things apart. But wisdom comes by putting things together." - John A. Morrison
  

Geert Hofstede Quotation

I'm currently working on some lecture notes, and thought to make reference to Geert Hofstede, the Dutch cultural analyst whose work is so important for understanding the differences between national cultures. Anyway, on one of his personal pages, I came across a great quotation by him that I thought I'd share:

"...[S]tudying culture without experiencing culture shock is like practising swimming without water."

For more information about Dr. Hofstede, I recommend both his business website, ITIM, and his personal homepage.