Business

"It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth."

"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."

"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

"The concept of 'measurement' becomes so fuzzy on reflection that it is quite surprising to have it appearing in physical theory at the most fundamental level... does not any analysis of measurement require concepts more fundamental than measurement? And should not the fundamental theory be about these more fundamental concepts?"

"Advancement of the human factor in industry... varies so much that unless we use measurement and abide by the results, there is no possibility of repeating the process accurately and efficiently at will, or of predicting and controlling the future conditions that assure that advancement."

"Mechanical engineering may be defined as the manufacture, installation, and repair of all kinds of machinery (including machine tools), prime movers and boilers, and engines."

"Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality."

"Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort."

"There are many branches of manufacturing industry which greatly depend for their success upon the designer's art, and it is necessary that the industrial designer should possess a knowledge of the processes of the manufacture in which his designs will be utilized, as well as of the properties and capabilities of the material to which they will be applied."

"I don't think industrial civilization is worth the distortion of human nature and the meanness and the loss of contact with the earth that it entails."

"There are no honest goods to buy or to sell; adulterated foods, shoddy manufacture of all that we wear, the underpaid labor and consumed life that make every garment a texture of falsehood, the hideous competitive war that slays its millions where swords and cannons slay their tens, all unite to baffle and mock the efforts of the awakened conscience at every turn, and make the industrial system seem like the triumph of hell and madness on the earth. Only by a sort of terrible daily denial of his spiritual self, a crucifixion of the principles by which he longs to organize his life, can a man wrest a stained and insecure livelihood from this terrible war for bread which we call industry."

"A Renaissance busied with psychology might perhaps have considered man’s faculty of action as worthy of investigation; a mediæval period, the strength of his faith, a classical period—in part at least—his capacity for happiness. Such traits have lost their value for the modern psychologist; they are not even regarded at all, and industry has remained as the only virtue—with its satellites, ambition and success—a conception of virtue which the Ancients would never have hesitated to relegate to the lowest of men, to pariahs and to slaves."

"Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?"

"Industry is the vis motrix of husbandry, and therefore an ancient English writer observes, "that a single uncultivated acre is a real physical evil in any state.""

"All the time the principles upon which industry should be based are simple, however difficult it may be to apply them; and if they are overlooked it is not because they are difficult, but because they are elementary. They are simple because industry is simple."

"Industry, which needs young men who are healthy, tractable, unpretentious and, I would even say, full of illusions, often receives engineers who are tired out, weak in body, and less ready than one could wish to take modest jobs and work so hard that everything seems easy to them. I am convinced that they could begin practical work much earlier and just as well prepared, by leaving things which are not used in practice out of their school education."

"Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety."

"God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. ... If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."

"Since the by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods."

"Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions."

"Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone."

"Advancement of the human factor in industry... varies so much that unless we use measurement and abide by the results, there is no possibility of repeating the process accurately and efficiently at will, or of predicting and controlling the future conditions that assure that advancement."

"In the 1950s, industrial workers had become the largest single group in every developed country, and unionized industrial workers in mass-production industry (which was then dominant everywhere) had attained upper-middle-class income levels. They had extensive job security, pensions, long paid vacations, and comprehensive unemployment insurance or "lifetime employment." Above all, they had achieved political power... Thirty-five years later, in 1990, industrial workers and their unions were in retreat. They had become marginal in numbers. Whereas industrial workers who make or move things had accounted for two fifths of the American work force in the 1950s, they accounted for less than one fifth in the early 1990s--that is, for no more than they had accounted for in 1900, when their meteoric rise began... By the year 2000 or 2010, in every developed free-market country, industrial workers will account for no more than an eighth of the work force. Union power has been declining just as fast."

"A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system... The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition."

"Big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class."

"“In industrial network communications, urgent assistance is the highest form of priority.”"

"Big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter."

"The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is among the most important of human activities. In so far as it is diverted from it, it may be harmless, amusing, or even exhilarating to those who carry it on, but it possesses no more social significance than the orderly business of ants and bees, the strutting of peacocks, or the struggles of carnivorous animals over carrion."

"There are only two things as complicated as insurance accounting and I have no idea what they are."

"The problem is not that this optimistic view is wrong. By economic accounting, the optimistic view is mostly right."

"These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . ."

"Accounting reveals the state of the business. It is a kind of thermometer of its condition and its health. One must consult it continually. Every employee in the enterprise, from the lowest up to the Director, must know the results for that part of the service for which he is responsible."

"The accounts of money, supplies and provisions should then be considered. The overseer should report what wine and oil has been sold, what price he got, what is on hand, and what remains for sale. Security should be taken for such accounts as ought to be secured. All other unsettled matters should be agreed upon. If any thing is needed for the coming year, it should be bought; every thing which is not needed should be sold. Whatever there is for lease should be leased."

"Si inaequalibus aequalia addas, omnia erunt inequalia."

"The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic."

"Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun."

"It’s simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation."

"The swift victory of the railway over the waterway resulted from organizational as well as technological innovation. Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair of locomotives, rolling stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of an administrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of managers responsible for the day-to-day operations. It meant, too, the formulation of brand new types of internal administrative procedures and accounting and statistical controls. Hence, the operational requirements of the railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business."

"… without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests."

"Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods."

"Modern industry is stated by some writers to have begun in 1738 when John Wyatt brought out a spinning machine. Others place the period as between 1750 and 1800, when the power loom and steam engine came into being. It was marked by the development of labor-saving machinery. It was brought about by the change from handicraft to manufacture."

"One of the uses of industry is to provide the wealth which may make possible better education."

"Decidedly the best application of art to industry is when a great many copies are made from an exceedingly good pattern."

"The great Inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honors, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil."

"The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other."

"Berle and Means’ book remains the point of departure and the central reference for reflection about corporate governance. It has given rise to differing, even contradictory interpretations, which explains how it could be used in support of opposing theories, notably on the question of the relationship between shareholders and managers. Thus, it has been used to argue in favor of the shareholder conception that is now dominant, even though it contains, as we shall see, a conception of the corporation that is radically different to the contractualist view that underpins the current doctrine of shareholder primacy."

"Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots."

"While it is legitimacy that gives a board the authority to impose its will on management, it is credibility that makes a board effective and value creating."

"Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society."

"We have to change the mindset of our corporate leaders and, obviously, we have to raise the level of corporate governance."