Academics From The United States

"Almost every study of the secret of the successful leader has agreed that the possession of a generous and unusual endowment of physical and nervous energy is essential to personal ascendancy. Those who rise in any marked way above the mass of men have conspicuously more drive, more sheer endurance, greater vigor of body and mind than the average person,"

"Leadership is the activity of influencing people to cooperate toward some goal which they come to find desirable."

"Sooner or later a democracy which is to survive has to be able to rely upon that enlargement of vision and purpose of those individuals who compose it, which means that their craving for devotion and self-sacrifice is satisfied in a democratic society on a nobler level, and with a finer recognition of the value of individual personality than is true of a national purpose of a totalitarian state under a dictator."

"More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed."

"Administration is the process and agency which is responsible for the determination of the aims for which an organization and its management are to strive, which establishes the broad policies under which they are to operate and which gives general oversight to the continuing effectiveness of the total operation in reaching the objectives sought."

"[Committees are] a tool of the democratic, knowledge-pooling, and desire-harmonizing process which cannot be otherwise forwarded. And when committees fail, as they sometimes do, it is because the limits to their role are not clearly understood or because they have not benefited by proper leadership from the chairman."

"Leadership is that combination of qualities by the possession of which one is able to get something done by others, chiefly because through his influence they become willing to do it."

"(Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"I was never threatened…I never knew anyone who was lynched. But there was subtle racism every day of my life. You could not speak to a white man unless he spoke to you first. On the sidewalk, I’d have to move so a white person could walk by."

"All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened."

"When people hear stories, they identify more closely with the characters. When I read aloud, people always come up to me and say, “I understand it much better now that I’ve heard you read it. I can hear the characters’ voices much clearer…”"

"In dialogue, I’m dealing with the sounds I’ve heard. One of the reasons I often write from first person or multiple points of view is to hear the voices of different characters. Omniscient narration becomes a problem because, for me, the omniscient is my own voice narrating the story and then bringing in characters for dialogue."

"I would think a faith in God is one thing. I think that if we could change the whole world and keep the land is another thing. Change things yet keep keep the relationship is another thing."

"I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God."

"King is probably one of three men of this century that I'll call heroic. A fantastic man as far as I'm concerned, for all that he did."

"The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it."

"Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing. Both roles are crucial, and they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing the wrong things well."

"By the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor's death, the gospel of industrial efficiency preached by American scientific managers was commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic. In the following years of world war, reconstruction, and adjustment, scientific management attracted a new generation of advocates and practitioners, many of whom would have perplexed and shocked Taylor and his immediate circle. Of the entrepreneurs of scientific management who succeeded Frank Gilbreth, Harrington Emerson, Richard Feiss, and other pioneers, none was more successful than (1886-1944). Unlike Tay­lor and his colleagues, Bedaux was and still is a mysterious figure. Secretive to a fault, he avoided professional contacts, refused to write for popular or technical journals, and spurned publicity. Yet he was a master salesman whose operations were global in scope and impact. Only in recent years, with the discovery of the papers of the British Bedaux Company, is it possible to gauge the impact of Bedaux and his extraordinary career."

"With the triumph of scientific management, unions would have nothing left to do, and they would have been cleansed of their most evil feature: the restriction of output. To underscore this idea, Taylor fashioned the myth that 'there has never been a strike of men working under scientific management', trying to give it credibility by constant repetition. In similar fashion he incessantly linked his proposals to shorter hours of work, without bothering to produce evidence of "Taylorized" firms that reduced working hours, and he revised his famous tale of Schmidt carrying pig iron at Bethlehem Steel at least three times, obscuring some aspects of his study and stressing others, so that each successive version made Schmidt's exertions more impressive, more voluntary and more rewarding to him than the last. Unlike Harrington Emerson, Taylor was not a charlatan, but his ideological message required the suppression of all evidence of worker's dissent, of coercion, or of any human motives or aspirations other than those his vision of progress could encompass."

"The estimate that at least $1,000,000 a day could be saved by the pursuit of methods of scientific management was first made by Mr. Harrington Emerson. It is submitted that, with aggregate operating expenses by the railroads in 1908 of $1,669,938,717, of which $1,035,437,528 was for labor, this estimate appears moderate."

"The competent specialist who has supplemented natural gifts and good judgment by analysis and synthesis can perceive attitudes and proclivities even in the very young, much more readily in those semi-matured, and can with almost infallible certainty point out, not only what work can be undertaken with fair hope of success, but also what slight modification or addition and diminution will more than double the personal power."

"In selecting human assistants such superficialities as education, as physical strength, even antecedent morality, are not as important as the inner attitudes, proclivities, character, which after all determine the man or woman."

"The type for the great newspaper is set up by linotype operators. Apprenticeship is rigorously limited. Some operators can never get beyond the 2500-em class, others with no more personal effort can set 5000 ems. Do the employers test out applicants for apprenticeship so as to be sure to secure boys who will develop into the 5000-em class? They do not: they select applicants for any near reason except the fundamental important one of innate fitness."

"It is psychology, not soil or climate, that enables a man to raise five times as many potatoes per acre as the average in his own state."

"Twelve Principles of Efficiency"

"We have not put our trust in Kings; let us not put it in natural resources, but grasp the truth that exhaustless wealth lies in the latent and as yet undeveloped capacities of individuals, of corporations, of States."

"Staff standards are not theological abstractions, but scientific approximations, and are evolved for the use of the line, the sole justification of the standards being that they will make line work more efficient. Staff standards being for the benefit of the line and often entrusted to line officials, must be put in the form of permanent instructions so that all may understand what is being aimed at, and deviations by the line be noted and reprimanded."

"The individual effort method of increasing the reward of the wage-earner includes all that is best in other methods, and attempts to exclude all that is objectionable. Its good points are summed up as follows:"

"The schedule is a moral contract or agreement with the men as to a particular machine operation, rate of wages and time. Any change in men [etc.] calls for a new schedule."

"Leaders encourage reflective backtalk. Norbert Wiener told me, “I never know what I say until I hear the response.” Leaders know the importance of having someone in their lives who will unfailingly and fearlessly tell them the truth."

"A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless … someone's got to make a wake up call."

"Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led."

"The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. And the way we become leaders is by learning about leadership through life and job experiences, not with university degrees."

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning."

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality."

"We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows."

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

"Isn’t the social scientist’s use of the null hypothesis simply the application of Popperian (or Bayesian) thinking in contexts in which probability plays such a big role? ... since an output variable such as adult IQ, or academic achievement, or effectiveness at communication, or whatever, will always, in the social sciences, be a function of a sizable but finite number of factors... Putting it crudely, if you have enough cases and your measures are not to-tally unreliable, the null hypothesis will always be falsified, regardless of the truth of the substantive theory."

"Sir Ronald has befuddled us, mesmerized us, and led us down the primrose path. I believe that the almost universal reliance on merely refuting the null hypothesis as the standard method for corroborating substantive theories in the soft areas is a terrible mistake, is basically unsound, poor scientific strategy, and one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of psychology."

"Meehl was an American psychologist who studied the successes and failures of predictions in many different settings. He found overwhelming evidence for a disturbing conclusion. Predictions based on simple statistical scoring were generally more accurate than predictions based on expert judgment. A famous example confirming Meehl’s conclusion is the “Apgar score,” invented by the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in 1953 to guide the treatment of newborn babies. The Apgar score is a simple formula based on five vital signs that can be measured quickly: heart rate, breathing, reflexes, muscle tone, and color. It does better than the average doctor in deciding whether the baby needs immediate help. It is now used everywhere and saves the lives of thousands of babies."

"You may say, “But, Meehl, R. A. Fisher was a genius, and we all know how valuable his stuff has been in agronomy. Why shouldn’t it work for soft psychology?” Well, I am not intimidated by Fisher’s genius, because my complaint is not in the field of mathematical statistics, and as regards inductive logic and philosophy of science, it is well-known that Sir Ronald permitted himself a great deal of dogmatism."

"A zealous and clever investigator ... undismayed by logic-of-science considerations and relying blissfully on the "exactitude" of modern statistical hypothesis-testing, has produced a long publication list and been promoted to a full professorship. In terms of his contribution to the enduring body of psychological knowledge, he has done hardly anything. His true position is that of a potent-but-sterile intellectual rake, who leaves in his merry path a long train of ravished maidens but no viable scientific offspring."

"Owing to the abusive reliance upon significance testing—rather than point or interval estimation, curve shape, or ordination—in the social sciences, the usual article summarizing the state of the evidence on a theory (such as appears in the Psychological Bulletin) is nearly useless."

"the null hypothesis in the life sciences is almost always false—if taken literally— in designs that involve any sort of self-selection or correlations found in the organisms as they come, that is, where perfect randomization of treatments by the experimenter does not exhaust the manipulations. Hence even “experimental” (rather than statistical or file data) research will exhibit this if interaction effects involving attributes of the persons are studied. Consequently, whether or not the null hypothesis is rejected is simply and solely a function of statistical power."

"Most so-called “theories” in the soft areas of psychology (clinical, counseling, social, personality, community, and school psychology) are scientifically unimpressive and technologically worthless. [...] Most of them suffer the fate that General MacArthur ascribed to old generals—They never die, they just slowly fade away."

"It is simply a sad fact that in soft psychology theories rise and decline, come and go, more as a function of baffled boredom than anything else; and the enterprise shows a disturbing absence of that cumulative character that is so impressive in disciplines like astronomy, molecular biology, and genetics."

"In the developed sciences, theories tend either to become widely accepted and built into the larger edifice of well-tested human knowledge or else they suffer destruction in the face of recalcitrant facts and are abandoned, perhaps regretfully as a “nice try.” But in fields like personology and social psychology, this seems not to happen. There is a period of enthusiasm about a new theory, a period of attempted application to several fact domains, a period of disillusionment as the negative data come in, a growing bafflement about inconsistent and unreplicable empirical results, multiple resort to ad hoc excuses, and then finally people just sort of lose interest in the thing and pursue other endeavors."

"As is well-known (and not disputed by Popper), when we spell out in detail the logical structure of what purports to be an observational test of a theoretical conjecture T, we normally find that we cannot get to an observational statement from T alone. We require further a set of often complex and problematic auxiliaries A, plus the empirical realization of certain conditions describing the experimental particulars C [but] in social science the auxiliaries A and the initial and boundary conditions of the system C are frequently as problematic as the theory T itself."

"a theory that has seven facts for it and three facts against it is not in good shape, and it would not be considered so in any developed science."