People From Missouri

"Race had never been a defining element in successful nation states. The true definition always depended far more on distinctions in language, culture, and political institutions. Southerners spoke precisely the same language as Northerners, so there was no distinction there."

"The only substantial difference between them, and the one that divided them politically almost since birth, was their system of labor."

"Historian Daniel A. Wren says that operations research/ management science has "… roots in scientific management." Like Taylor and the Gilbreths, today's management scientists use research and analysis to find optimal solutions to management problems. Modern-day management scientists, of course, use much more sophisticated mathematical tools and computers. And management science's goal is not to try to find a “science of management” but “to use scientific analysis and tools to solve management problems.”"

"Wren and Bedeian 2008 is the most important management history book, and it is the one most widely used as a primary source in courses on management history."

"The Management of Innovation (1961) [by Tom Burns and George M. Stalker is]... the first major attempt to deal with the nature of organization-environment relations and identify the types of organizational structure and managerial practices that are appropriate for different environmental condition. Introduced the mechanistic-organic polarity (never a dichotomy) to the management lexicon."

"Although the Gordon and Howell report noted the diversity of approaches to the study of management, it was Harold Koontz who delineated the differences and applied the catchy label ‘‘management theory jungle.’’"

"As open systems, organizations faced an environment that might be placid and benevolent, or turbulent and harsh. Economic, social, political, and technological changes could come rapidly or slowly, and some organizational arrangements might be better able to cope with the changing environment than others. Could it be that there was no one way to structure an organization that design was influenced by environmental factors and could vary, depending on technology?"

"Mooney's unpublished paper “The Science of Industrial Organization” (1929) portrays GM's multidivisional organization's use of the line-staff concept in organizing overseas assembly plants. Here I compare General Motors with Ford Motor Company, which had first-mover advantages overseas, and examine how each company organized and managed their international operations. “Linking pins,” a social-science concept, illustrates how GM's organizational hierarchy achieved vertical coordination of effort."

"Management as an activity has always existed to make people’s desires through organized effort. Management facilitates the efforts of people in organized groups and arises when people seek to cooperate to achieve goals."

"[A] famous photograph... showing McCulloch (1898–1969) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) with British Cyberneticians Ross Ashby (1903–1972) and Grey Walter (1910–1977), first appeared in de Latil (1953) with the caption "The four pioneers of Cybernetics get together in Paris", and encapsulates a view of the development of cybernetics that has slowly become more accepted: that there were important British contributions from the outset."

"Some of these patterns of performance were calculable, though only as types of behaviour, in advance; some were quite unforeseen."

"Simon, always a fool for simplicity, accepted. Punch took an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it. He said, 'This has a simple arithmetical proof but no rational explanation of the paradox.' He gave it to Simon. Simon read it, looked at Punch with raised eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, shook his head sadly, and got up and left the room without a word."

"Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal. Therefore it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goalseeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is life."

"Rapidly going over what I could recall of Jim Bursley's information about pathological curves confirmed the conjecture. The snowball curve, derived from an equilateral triangle, is a perimeter of infinite length enclosing a finite area. The angles or points of the perimeter are uncountable. An equilateral triangle projected integrally in the third dimension is a triangular pyramid of equal surfaces. The three-dimensional snowflake derived from this pyramid--hence its diamantine appearance--is a finite volume enclosed in a surface of infinite area. The convolutions of such a surface, to be gathered around its defined content extrude a number of discrete angles or points beyond all possibility of computation. The pressure on each point is infinitesimal, unmeasurably small; the total external pressure exerted on any part of the surface is an aggregate of infinitesimal values, itself infinitesimal."

"These models are of course so simple that any more detailed comparison between them and living creatures would be purely conjectural."

"[A]n electro-mechanical creature which behaves so much like an animal that it has been known to drive a not usually timid lady upstairs to lock herself in her bedroom, an interesting blend of magic and science."

"In a modest villa on the outskirts of Bristol lives Dr Grey Walter, a neurologist, who makes robots as a hobby. They are small, and he doesn’t dress them up to look like men – he calls them tortoises. And so cunningly have their insides been designed that they respond to the stimuli of light and touch in a completely life-like manner. This model is named Elsie, and she sees out of a photo-electric cell which rotates about her body. When light strikes the cell, driving and steering mechanisms send her hurrying towards it. If she brushes against any objects in her path, contacts are operated which turn the steering away, and so automatically she takes avoiding action. Mrs Walter’s pet is Elmer, Elsie’s brother, in the darker vest. He works in exactly the same way. Dr Walter says that his electronic toys work exactly as though they have a simple two-cell nervous system, and that, with more cells, they would be able to do many more tricks. Already Elsie has one up on Elmer: when her batteries begin to fail, she automatically runs home to her kennel for charging up, and in consequence can lead a much gayer life."

"The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back a wartime talk with the psychologist, , whose untimely death was one of the greatest losses Cambridge has suffered in years. When he was engaged on a warjob for the Government, he came to get the help of an automatic analyzer with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before the home study was turned into a workshop, the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal."

"In any case there is an intense modern interest in machines that imitate life. The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior."

"[Walter even gave the tortoises a mock-biological name, Machina speculatrix] because they illustrate particularly the exploratory, speculative behaviour that is so characteristic of most animals."

"In the dark ages before the invention of the electronic vacuum tube there were many legends of living statues and magic pictures. One of the commonest devices of sorcerers and witches was the model of an enemy which somehow embodied his soul, so that injury to the model would be reflected by suffering or death of the original... Idolatry, witchcraft and other superstitions are so deeply rooted and widespread that it is possible that even the most detached scientific activity may be psychologically equivalent to them; such activity may help to satisfy the desire for power, to assuage the fear of the unknown or to compensate for the flatness of everyday existence."

"[E]xperiments with a simple little machine, designed to mimic certain elementary features of animal behavior... Consisting only of two vacuum tubes, two motors, a photoelectric cell and a touch contact, all enclosed in a tortoise-shaped 'shell, the model was a species of artificial creature which could explore its surroundings and seek out favorable conditions. It was named Machine speculatrix."

"The mechanism of learning is of course one of the most enthralling and baffling mysteries in the field of biology."

"His popular and academic reputation encompassed a heterogeneous series of roles ranging from robotics pioneer, home guard explosive experts, wife swapper, t.v.-pundit, experimental drugs user, and skindiver to anarcho-syndicalist champion of leucotomy and electro-convulsive therapy."

"what moves is what is already moving. Sort of Newtonian."

"When there is no game, don't play,..."

"When the Rothchilds got the word about the battle of Waterloo - in the movie it was by carrier pigeon - they didn't rush down and buy British consols, the government bonds. They rushed in and sold, and then, in the panic, they bought."

"Somebody has to be on the other side."

"All the funds simply can't get through the exit door at the same time."

"The phrase " the Gnomes of Zurich" was coined by George Brown, the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain."

"Prices have no memory, and yesterday has nothing to do with tomorrow."

"The reason everybody signed up for a computer was that everybody else was signing up for a computer."

"Wall Street, as you already know, is part of Marshall McLuhan's vision of the world in the Electric Age, that is, a global village dependent on oral-aural communication."

"Currencies do not vote."

"Most accountants are honorable men, trying to do a job. But they are hired by corporations, not by investors."

"You can be in love with that piece of paper if you want to, but that piece of paper doesn't love you,..."

"You have to go for the quantum jumps."

"The strongest emotions in the marketplace are greed and fear."

"This is the way things are, and the Game has been so successful that, like everything, it will get more and more successful until it stops being successful."

"But the investors who really follow the market, the ones who call up all the time, ninety percent of them really don't care whether they make money or not."

"Nothing works all the time and in all kinds of markets."

"Godliness is in league with riches."

"It is a parable of pure capitalism, never jam today and a case of jam tomorrow; but as any of the Smiths will tell you, anyone who has ever sold IBM has regretted it."

"The world is not the way they tell you it is."

"It is amazing how stupid one can be in graduate school, because while I was puzzling through L1(Y) = Y/V = M1, the income velocity of money, I missed all the fun."

"In fact, a crowd of men acts like a single woman."

"All you need is a hell of an aperceptive mass, an IQ of 150, and a dollop of ESP, and you can ignore the headlines, because you anticipated them months ago."

"In Freud's crowd, the individuals fasten on an object, substitute it for their ego ideal, and all those with the same ego ideal identify themselves with each other in their ego. Remove the object and you get anxiety."

"Everything sculpture has, my work doesn’t."

"I wanted work that didn't involve incredible assumptions about everything. I couldn't begin to think about the order of the universe or, the nature of American society. I didn't want work that was general or universal in the usual sense. I didn't want it to claim too much. Obviously the means and the structure couldn't be separate and couldn't even be thought of as two things joined. Neither word meant anything. A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole. The shapes and materials shouldn't be altered by their context."