What They Said...

"Mere survival is a so-so aspiration.  Anybody can survive in some way or other, even the skid-row bum.  The trick is to survive gallantly, to feel the surging impulse of commercial mastery; not just to experience the sweet smell of success, but to have the visceral feel of entrepreneurial greatness."

— Professor Theodore Levitt

"Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition.
But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up."

— Raymond Chandler

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Not all that wander are lost."

— JRR Tolkien

"A business that is not profitable is going to fail.  At the same time, I've never felt comfortable with people who think the purpose of business is to make a profit.  That doesn't make any sense to me.  It's like saying that the purpose of life is to eat."

— John Mackey, Founder & CEO, Whole Foods

"Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day,
filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements."

— Ron Livngston as Peter Gibbons, "Office Space"

The best explanation of inadequate performance ever...

"...the launch industry passed through a time of ambitious forecasts
that were not met by actual launch dates..."

— International Launch Services, Inc.

Quote from famous inventory planning analyst:

"The forecast is right.  The demand is wrong."

— reported by Shivi Shankaran

"Divergent thinking (or creative thinking) is often not rewarded in schools and organizations.
For example, Getzels and Jackson (1962) observed that teachers prefer students who have high IQs but are not high in creativity.  High IQ students and managers tend to gauge success by conventional standards (i.e., to behave as teachers expect them to and seek careers that conform to what others expect of them).  In contrast, highly creative people use unconventional standards for determining success, and their career choices do not usually conform to expectations.
Most educational training, including that of MBAs, favors logical or convergent thinking
and does not nurture creative or divergent thinking."
— Professor Leigh L. Thompson