Orators From The United States

"Ask! Interviewing/information extraction is an (exceptionally important) ‘art’ that must be mastered!"

"Read deep! Read often! Out-READ the 'Competition'!!!"

"The ... moral responsibility ... of every leader is staggering—an opportunity to be of service to (literally) civilization. Or not."

"Training in listening, in statistical techniques and problem cause-and-effect analysis, in group problem solving, in sophisticated financial analysis (for everyone)—and then constant retraining, for upgrading and learning new skills—simply must become the norm, for realtor, banker, or high-tech wizard."

"The well-served customer...is an appreciating asset. Every small act on her or his behalf ups the odds of repeat business, add-on business, and priceless word-of-mouth referral."

"The most important personal ‘core competence’ by far is a rich set of relationships."

"Make the collective, professional pursuit of listening skills per se a keystone of corporate 'culture'."

"Have fun/Make it fun. … All human endeavor is about emotion. Zest, joy, pride—and fun—are near the heart of any successful enterprise."

"If you want to achieve Excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than Excellent work. The first 99.9% of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what set of road blocks those around you erect."

"Musing on the phrase ‘waste of time.’ So much more complex than it appears. Many ‘wastes of time’—small talk, daydreaming—are imperatives.”"

"What is my personal strategy for the next 10 hours? Who can I talk with or what can I volunteer for to learn something new?"

"The Peters Principles: Enthusiasm. Emotion. Excellence. Energy. Excitement. Service. Growth. Creativity. Imagination. Vitality. Joy. Surprise. Independence. Spirit. Community. Limitless human potential. Diversity. Profit. Innovation. Design. Quality. Entrepreneurialism. Wow."

"As project chief you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will … dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!"

"The Big Four: Out-read 'em. Out-study 'em. Out-present 'em. Out-listen 'em."

"Do not even flippantly badmouth anybody this week. Button it up."

"Service is the highest human calling."

"Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes."

"The vitality of our network will determine our professional fate."

"If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?"

"Lists simplify, clarify, edify."

"Life is too short for non-WOW projects."

"Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values."

"What gets measured gets done."

"Most of their real innovation comes from the market"

"Transforming leadership, [is defined as] leadership that builds on man's need for meaning, leadership that creates institutional purpose … he is the value-shaper, the exemplar, the maker of meanings … he is the true artist, the true pathfinder."

"Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies."

"Creating in all employees the awareness that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the company's success."

"EXCELLENCE in <140 Characters: Cherish your people, cuddle your customers, wander around, “try it” beats “talk about it,” Excellence or else, tell the truth."

"Bosses: You make your living going to meetings. Hence any meeting that does not bubble and incite enthusiasm is a forever-lost opportunity."

"I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote Search. There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove. I went out and talked to genuinely smart, remarkably interesting, first-rate people. I had an infinite travel budget that allowed me to fly first class and stay at top-notch hotels and a license from McKinsey to talk to as many cool people as I could all around the United States and the world. I went to see Karl Weick, who had totally influenced my life. I had read his work a thousand times, and I'd never met him. I went to Oslo to talk with , who had studied empowerment on oil tankers. I went to the in London, where the leading thinkers on organizational development were looking at why people work together effectively in team configurations under certain circumstances. Word of the meeting got back to McKinsey USA, and I was invited to give a presentation to the top management of PepsiCo... The time was drawing near for the Pepsi presentation to take place. One morning at about 6, I sat down at my desk overlooking the San Francisco Bay from the 48th floor of the Bank of America Tower, and I closed my eyes. Then I leaned forward, and I wrote down eight things on a pad of paper. Those eight things haven't changed since that moment. They were the eight basic principles of Search."

"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else."

"Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?"

"The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood. ...The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go."

"My other car is a bright green city."

"Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems."

"To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs."

"We have to develop a model of prosperity that 4.5 billion more people can share and we don't know how to do it."

"We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. … Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible."

"Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

"The future starts now."

"No future can be beautiful which involves an economy that violates the rights of future generations, that degrades fundamental planetary systems in any way, or that fails to offer every human being a basic share of safety, dignity and happiness."

"Any future which is not beautiful is unacceptable."

"McKibben understands that a central goal of movement leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers."

"Bill McKibben has long said, when people ask him what's the most significant thing you can do for the climate, "Stop being an individual; join something.""

"Bill McKibben, a leading champion in the fight against climate change"

"Consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high."

"Year after year throughout the last two decades they’ve made more money than any company in the history of money. But poor people around the world are already paying for those profits, and every generation that follows us now will pay as well, because the “Exxon position” has helped take us over one tipping point after another. Their sins of emission, like so many other firms and individuals, are bad. But their sins of omission are truly inexcusable."

"ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.... But though we know now that behind the scenes Exxon understood precisely what was going on, in public they feigned ignorance or worse.... Thanks to Exxon’s willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess."

"...as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming....Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns....The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt."

"If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage."