Companies

"And you people who live (...) near Rugunga, (...) go out. You will see Inkotanyi's straw huts in the marsh (...). I think that those who have guns should immediately go to these Inkotanyi. (...) encircle them and kill them (...)."

"It is 7.35a.m. here in Kigali. They will be struck by misfortune, they will be struck by misfortune (...). (...) those living in Mburabuturo, in the woods of Mburabuturo, look carefully see whether there are no Inyenzis inside."

"[Dallaire] is working for the Inyenzi-Nkotanyi and he is himself an Inyenzi. (…) Canada will learn the news of Dallaire’s death. (…) In fact, Dallaire is the basis of this war. This is known."

"There is no end to Rwanda's misfortune. Soldiers were entrusted to a man called Dallaire (…). He showed his true colours right from the [start]. How is he going to lead these men? How is he going to lead them? Anyway we are going to stay behind a man called Roger Booh-Booh, this son of Cameroon, whom you cannot really complain about."

"What we know at RTLM, the radio loved by the Interahamwe, the radio that supports the Interahamwe, the radio that supports the youths of all republican parties (...), as General Bizimungu says, the youths are in the frontline."

"We have used the Interahamwe who have just routed [the Inyenzi] with stones, clubs, guns, grenades and clubs. (…) Remain vigilant at the roadblocks, wherever the Inyenzi are. Greetings to those who man the roadblocks."

"What type of person got it into his head that the RTLM hates the Tutsis? (…) Radio RTLM does not hate the Tutsis. It has no conflict with them. In fact we do!!"

"It is not only today that the PRF’s Inyenzi Batutsis want to take and monopolize power in order to oppress the Hutus and cast democracy out of the window, the Batutsi’s superiority complex has been around for a very long time."

"Good companies will meet needs; great companies will create markets."

"Even people within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. "To make profits", most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations becomes ever more shielded from uncertainty."

"Over the long term, the companies of America behave more like biology than anything else. In biology, all the individuals die, and so do all the species — it's just a question of time. And that's pretty well what happens in the economy, too."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be. … A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"It appears to me that the atmosphere of the temple of Justice is polluted by the presence of such things as these companies."

"A company is perfectly responsible in every sense."

"It is a very lamentable state of things, but I see no help for it. The money in such cases is gone—gone by mismanagement always, often by fraud and jobbery, and by the time that such questions come before the Courts it is a mere suggestion upon whom the loss shall fall. It is rarely borne by the persons whose ignorance, mismanagement, or dishonesty has caused the loss, as they are almost always without means, and have generally speculated as badly for themselves as for those who have put them in office. I see no help for it but in that which appears to be a plant of slow growth, caution on the part of persons liable to be affected by the ruin of these societies."

"In matters where a company is not restrained by Parliament they have a right to make reasonable regulations; but it will always be a question whether their regulations are reasonable or not."

"The office of director … a man ought not to fill without qualification."

"The director is really a watch-dog, and the watch-dog has no right without the knowledge of his master to take a sop from a possible wolf."

"In their desire to check dishonest and reckless trading Courts must be careful not to put tighter fetters on companies than the Legislature has authorised."

"I do not wish in any way to depart from the principle that a wrongdoing director, whether he be morally or legally wrong, should be made liable for the highest amount which could have been obtained from the property wrongly taken by him while it was in his hands."

"The company behind Nupedia, Bomis, Inc., has a great deal of experience designing and promoting high-traffic websites. We intend to put that experience (and the profit from that!) behind the Nupedia project to ensure it is a success."

"If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate."

"Wales has also repeatedly revised the description of a search site he founded called Bomis, which included a section with adult photos called 'Bomis Babes.'"

"Wales admitted to changing references to Bomis Babes several times. But he said he was correcting an error, and disputed the characterization of Bomis Babes as soft porn."

"Wales had become involved with the growing e-commerce boom. However, his first project, an 'erotic search engine' called Bomis, would be controversial."

"Using the Bomis site, Wales and Larry Sanger then launched their first online encyclopedia, Nupedia."

"Wales was criticized in 2005 for editing his own biography in Wikipedia, downplaying the pornographic nature of Bomis and minimizing Sanger's role as cofounder of Wikipedia."

"Although Wales himself had made his personal fortune as a futures trader in Chicago in the 1990s, he wasn't the one funding Nupedia. This was done through one of Wales's less altruistic ventures, a Web portal called Bomis.com that featured, among other items, soft-core pornography."

"In the Wild-West style Internet economy of the mid-Nineties, Wales co-founded a Web directory called Bomis."

"Described by The Atlantic magazine as 'The Playboy of the Internet,' Bomis provided the peer-to-peer technology to link together sites about Pamela Anderson and Anna Kournikova."

"What Wales had learned as an adolescent playing video games, and relearned from his experience with Bomis, was the power of the network, the value of what has become known as 'distributed' technology."

"Using some of the profits from an adult content site that he had helped start (Bomis), Wales launched Nupedia."

"Before deciding what the company would really do, the men had to settle on a name. From working in the Chicago business world, Wales jokingly referred to them as 'bitter old men in suits.' The name stuck in the form of an acronym, BOMIS, although officially both men say the name stands for nothing."

"Up until late 2002, Wikipedia.com was still a for-profit business under the umbrella of Bomis."

"Despite the extreme success of Wikipedia, as a nonprofit it was no longer making money for Bomis, which was then forced to lay off most of its staff."

"Nupedia launched in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. … Wales's company Bomis, an Internet search portal and a vendor of online 'erotic images' (featuring the Bomis Babe Report), picked up the tab initially."

"Wikipedia would have never gotten off the ground without the support of Wales and Bomis."

"Until 2003, Bomis, in effect, owned Wikipedia, but in June of that year, all the assets were transferred to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation."

"Jimmy Wales edited his own Wikipedia entry to remove references to Larry Sanger's role in cofounding the online encyclopedia and to Bomis Babes as presenting 'pornography.'"

"Originally all of Wikipedia was at the .com address. Bomis, the company owned by Wikipedia patron Jimbo Wales, hoped to make Wikipedia profitable, or at least cover the costs of operation, so it was at least theoretically a commercial operation. At one point, Jimbo was planning on placing unobtrusive advertisements on Wikipedia, but that plan has since been completely abandoned."

"Jimbo Wales founded the Bomis search engine and Web site at the onset of the dot-com boom in 1996. Bomis helped people find 'erotic photography,' and earned money through advertising as well as subscription fees for premium content."

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales underscores that Bomis, his dot-com search engine business, was not directly involved in pornography, pointing out that its content was R-rated rather than X-rated, like Maxim magazine rather than Playboy."

"The solution is IBM."

"Recently, icdn's role as a willing accomplice in the mass murders of Gypsies — and indeed, the larger question of its Swiss operation — has come back to haunt the technology company. Big Blue has refused to answer the charges since the first simultaneous disclosures in 40 countries on February 11, 2001, that IBM knowingly systemized Hitler's persecution and extermination of Europe's Jews, directly from New York and through its subsidiaries in Europe coordinated through the Swiss office. But on June 22, a Swiss appellate Court ruled that a compensation suit filed by the Gypsy (Roma) (Roma) International Recognition and Compensation Action could proceed. "The precision, speed and reliability of IBM's machines," the Swiss judge ruled, "especially related to the censuses of the German population and racial biology by the Nazis, were praised in the publications of Dehomag itself, the branch of respondent IBM. It does not thus seem unreasonable to deduce that IBM's technical assistance facilitated the tasks of the Nazis in the commission of their crimes against humanity, acts also involving accountancy and classification by IBM machines and utilized in the concentration camps themselves." The judge's ruling pointedly added: "In view of the preceding, IBM's complicity with material and intellectual assistance in the criminal acts of the Nazis during the Second World War by means of its Geneva establishment does not appear to be ruled out, as there is a great deal of evidence indicating that the Geneva establishment was aware that it was aiding and supporting these acts.""

"IBM has consistently refused to allow access to its Swiss office files, pppp itself was some 60 years ago, Bukovinsky quipped, "So what. What is the point?""

"Fighting for your convictions can be a lonely business. But it's my observation that the people who get ahead in IBM are the ones who are willing to do just that. (1973)"

"The author convincingly shows the relentless efforts made by IBM to maximize profit by selling its machines and its punch cards to a country whose criminal record would soon be widely recognized. Indeed, Black demonstrates with great precision that the godlike owner of the corporation, Thomas Watson, was impervious to the moral dimension of his dealings with Hitler's Germany and for years even had a soft spot for the Nazi regime."

"All successful companies have good strategies. They all have good processes. They reward people for the right things. For the companies that truly break through, it comes down to their people. For us, it's not a question of talent. We have the best people in the industry. I knew that before I came to IBM, and I know it today, But are our people going to stretch to their potential - step up and lead? That's the real issue for IBM. What's really important is the personal commitment that each of us makes about how we're going to behave, how much we care, how much we're willing to give, how much we're willing to learn and adapt, what we think about every day that drives what we do operationally. It comes back to win, execute and team. Those are not slogans or even institutional values. They are personal commitments. They're not things of the head, they're things of the heart and the gut. They are behavioral, not intellectual. You do not get up every morning and salute them. You get up every morning and live them. We have completed, for the most part, the task of restructuring the institution. Our success now is going to be a function of personal behavior - the behavior of each and every one of us. (1998)"

"Around the time that IBM introduced the PC, a catch phrase in the industry was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.""

"We encourage frankness in IBM; we encourage everyone to speak out. Let's make it a daily habit. (1972)"

"In recent years, there has been a widespread and growing public concern about the need to protect the individual's right to privacy. It is my belief that few issues will prove to be of greater significance to IBM. ... I am determined that we in IBM practice internally what we propose externally for out customers and the society generally. Accordingly, last year I asked for an intensive examination of our personnel practices to make sure that we are doing everything possible to protect the privacy of our own employees. That is a complex effort but it has been a fruitful one. While not complete, it has taken us a long way toward my personal goal of establishing IBM as the leader in employee privacy. (1974)"

"I know that IBMers everywhere are working harder than ever to meet heavy customer demand. But none of us is so important that our job and the company can't get along without us once in a while. The employee who chronically delays a vacation is not doing himself or anybody any good. He may be unknowingly tampering with his own health and well-being; and he is shortchanging his family. .... It's not how many miles you travel that matters. What counts is the distance you put between yourself and that daily routine. (1979)"

"There are many things I would like IBM to be known for, but no matter how big we become, I want this company to be known as the company which has the greatest respect for the individual. (1957)"

"We believe in the importance of the individual in IBM and we'll never forget it. We think it's more important than the most fantastic electronic product that we could ever invent. (1957)"

"Failure to delegate is the biggest single obstacle to job performance in IBM. (1959)"

"The employee relations of this company were founded long ago upon the Golden Rule and we expect all of our managers in working with their people to start with this fundamental. In keeping with this, we will continue to be sensitive to any personal problem which may temporarily affect an employee's performance. (1960)"

"The pursuit of perfection means not just enthusiasm for doing a topnotch job in important things, it means attention to detail and an itch to innovate and improve in whatever we have to do. It means to be dissatisfied with the status quo. ... We ought to know precisely why a given job is done in a particular way, and why it is done at all, and why it can't be done more effectively, if it must be done at all. This is the attitude that built our modern industrial society. It is the attitude that built IBM. I hope we never lose it. (1962)"

"Kierkegaard drew his point -- you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never do anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business model needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them. (1963)"

"We accept out responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest. We believe that the immediate and long-term public interest is best served in a system of competing enterprises. Therefore, we believe we should compete vigorously, but in a spirit of fair play, with respect to our competitors, and with respect for the law. In communities where IBM facilities are located, we do our utmost to create an environment in which people want to work and live. We agknowledge our obligation as a business to help improve the quality of the society we are part of. We want to be in the forefront of those companies which are working to make the world a better place. (1969)"

"Waste of resources is a mortal sin at IKEA."

"IKEA is not completely perfect. It irritates me to death to hear it said that IKEA is the best company in the world. We are going the right way to becoming it, for sure, but we are not there yet."

"There are rumors that the Swedish handball girls are trying to sleep their way to victory in Paris."