Harvard University Alumni

"It is important to remove artificial barriers–stumbling stones, often local in origin and coming from incumbent opposition to entry–and to not burden businesses with taxes that reduce their internally generated funds for reinvestment, growth and striving to overcome market challenges."

"When the theory performs well you also think, “Are there parallel results in naturally occurring field data?” You look for coherence across different data sets because theories are not specific to particular data sources. Such extensions are important because theories often make specific assumptions about information and institutions which can be controlled in the laboratory, but which may not accurately represent field data generating situations. Testing theories on the domain of their assumptions is sterile unless it is part of a research program concerned with extending the domain of applications of theory to field environments"

"Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness."

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me."

"Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

"Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself."

"War has given applied psychology a tremendous impulse. This will, on the whole, do good, for psychology, which is the largest and last of the sciences, must not try to be too pure."

"In the same way, it is not necessarily paternalistic to advocate the restriction of air pollution. Individual citizens and firms may produce more air pollution than any of them actually want because they know that there is little to be gained from uncoordinated individual restraint. If I avoid driving a gas-guzzling car, the impact on the overall level of air pollution w ill be utterly insignificant. So I have no incentive to take it into account in making my driving decisions even if I care greatly about reducing air pollution. Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment."

"There are very few scholars who can legitimately say that they founded a discipline. Al Chandler is one of them. Prior to Chandler, business history tended to be the study of individual businesses or entrepreneurs with little theoretical importance. To paraphrase one criticism of history as "damn fact after another," business history tended to be "damn business after another." Histories came out in conjunction with anniversaries of companies: They were highly celebratory, sometimes informative, but not very useful to practitioners. Studies of entrepreneurs were just hagiographies.Chandler developed for business history a coherent theoretical framework built around his "3-pronged investment" in manufacturing, marketing, and management, and the notion of "organizational capabilities." The firm was something much more than a network of individual contracts or the vision of its entrepreneur. The people inside firms learned, developed effective routines, and innovated. While we have sophisticated theories of competition in economics, the cooperative teamwork inside firms is just as important. Chandler stressed the importance of organizational capabilities, technological innovation through R&D, problem solving, knowledge, and continuous learning—investment in human capital and technology that only firms could generate. Chandler placed the issue of managerial coordination squarely in the center of understanding economic life."

"Increase on productivity and decrease in unit costs (often identified with economies of scale) resulted far more from the increases in the volume and velocity of throughput then from a growth in the size of the factory and plant."

"Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over these despots."

"The minutest details of cost of materials and labor in every department appeared from day to day and week to week in the accounts; and soon every man about the place was made to realize it. The men felt and often remarked that the eye of the company were on them through the books."

"In most British enterprises senior executives worked closely in the same office building, located in or near the largest plant, having almost daily personal contact with, and thus directly supervising middle and often lower-level managers. Such enterprises had no need for the detailed organization charts and manuals that had come into common use in large American and German firms before 1914. In these British companies, selection to senior positions and to the board depended as much on personal ties as on managerial competence. The founders and their heirs continued to have a significant influence on top-level decision-making even after their holdings in the enterprise were diminished."

"In the 1850s and 18605 the modern commodity dealer who purchased directly from the farmer and sold directly to the processor took over the marketing and distribution of agricultural products. In the same years the full-line, full-service wholesaler began to market most standardized consumer goods. Then in the 1 870s and 188os the modern mass retailer — the department store, the mail-order house, and the chain store — started to make inroads on the wholesaler's markets."

"To maintain and continue a high volume of flow demanded organizational innovation. It would be achieved only by creating an administrative hierarchy operated by many full-time salaried managers."

"Strategy can be defined as the determination of the long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals"

"The market remained the generator of demand for goods and services, but modern business enterprise took over the functions of coordinating flows of goods and services through existing processes of production and distribution, and of allocating funds and personnel for future production and distribution. As modern business enterprise acquired functions hitherto carried out by the market, it became the most powerful institution in the American economy and its managers the most influential group of economic decision makers. The rise of modern business enterprise in the United States, therefore, brought with it managerial capitalism."

"Multi-unit business enterprise replaced small traditional enterprise when administrative coordination permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms."

"Complete accountability is established and enforced throughout; and if there there is any error committed, it will be discovered on a comparison with the books and can be traced to its source."

"Modern factory management (but not it must be stressed the management of large modern multi-unit enterprises) had the genesis in the United States in the Springfield Armory."

"The systems and controls developed at the armory were as critical to the development of what became known as the 'American System of Manufacturing' as the new metalworking machinery and machine tools."

"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."

"Men's mind and abilities grow and expand with use of responsibilities."

"In regard to the terrors as well as the superstitions and immoralities of religion, it will not do to urge that they are due only to the imperfections of the men who professed the various religions. If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good."

"The realization of the pathetic frailty of the knowledge or beliefs on which our life depends thus leads not to despair but to open-eyed courage. But it also points to a most intimate connection between scientific method and liberal civilization. Science is not, as is popularly conceived, a new set of dogmas taught by a newer and better set of priests called scientists. It is rather a method which is based on a critical attitude to all plausible and self-evident propositions. It seeks not to reject them, but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives, each to receive the same logical treatment before we can determine which is the better grounded, is the essence of liberalism in art, morals, and politics. . . . Like science, liberalism insists on a critical examination of the content of all our beliefs, principles, or initial hypotheses and on subjecting them to a continuous process of verification so that they will be progressively better founded in experience and reason."

"Unlike the physicist, the psychologist … investigates processes that belong to the same order—perception, learning, thinking—as those by which he conducts his investigation."

"Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability."

"It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e. g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one."

"Effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as “threshold capabilities”; that is, they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. But my research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership."

"Goleman deserves credit for systematically testing the Indian systems using the scientific method and establishing their credibility. But this need not erase the source tradition in the process. When knowledge is appropriated from ancient Greece, for instance, it is duly acknowledged as such, and the same standard must apply in the case of Indian knowledge. Such acknowledgment keeps the knowledge system alive in its native form so it can enrich us further."

"Every businessperson knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled executive who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail at the job. And they also know a story about someone with solid—but not extraordinary—intellectual abilities and technical skills who was promoted into a similar position and then soared. Such anecdotes support the widespread belief that identifying individuals with the “right stuff” to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the personal styles of superb leaders vary: Some leaders are subdued and analytical; others shout their manifestos from the mountaintops. And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds require a more forceful authority."

"Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that are based on its five elements: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships"

"Emotional Intelligence' refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. It describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence, the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ."

"In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. These two fundamentally different ways of knowing interact to construct our mental life."

"People who are emotionally adapt — who know and manage their feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings — are at an advantage in any domain in life, whether in romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics."

"IQ is a genetic given that cannot be changed by life experience, and that our destiny in life is largely fixed by these aptitudes."

"‘My hypotheses are generated from experience with TM but are framed in terms of meditation in general in the hope that they will be tested on a variety of different systems’."

"… I discovered … an alternate psychological system. … Abhidharma, which is the Sanskrit term for this model of mind. Then I started writing about it in psychology journals, albeit very obscure psychology journals, because they were the only ones that were interested. … it was important to bring this news to Western psychology because … it …extend(ed) the horizon line of the potential of being human. … if psychology’s about anything, it’s about the mind and what are it’s (sic) upper limits; what are the worst places we can go, what are the best places we can go? And this described some best places that we hadn’t heard of yet…"

"There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character."

"transcendental meditation (sic) as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is the one I’ve practiced longest, am most thoroughly familiar with theoretically, and about which I hypothesize here. Transcendental meditation (sic), or TM, like most yoga systems taught in the US, traces its roots back to the tradition of which Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is the classic statement."

"If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far."

"There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers — wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO."

"Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and "proofs" all their own."

"… a psychological system (was) at the heart of Buddhism … absolutely unknown in Western psychology. … I started to write about it, and the way it worked with the mind, the way it conceived of what you could do to transform the mind, … meditation was very much at the heart of that. … Western psychology did not understand that … meditation did transform the mind, and now we know, the brain. No one had ever heard of the word, neuroplasticity in the 1970s, … repeated experiences change the structure and function of the brain was implicit in Buddhist psychology and unknown in Western psychology. … you could transform the mind, to the point where, … your inner emotional state was not at the whim of external conditions, but was an ongoing, …equanimous state that was one of kindness. This was inconceivable. … I would say psychologists in the 2010s don’t think about it that much as whole."

"One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere."

"To love the carnal self means to love the body-mind. I cannot abuse my body with alcohol, stress, and self-indulgence and still claim to love my self."

"The moment I step out of my adult identity, it becomes obvious that my tribe is not significantly different from other tribes in its habitual projection of blame for conflict onto an enemy. It is disturbing for an individual to reject the tribe’s claim to self-righteousness because it excludes him or her from the civil religion, the social immortality system, and the ritual of scapegoating, in which guilt is alleviated by being assigned to an outcast or enemy that the tribe may destroy in the name of God."

"The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts."

"The evil we previously objectified and assigned to exterior agents—devils, communists, capitalists, chauvinists, faithless lovers, the system—must be discovered within. We can no longer divide the world between good and evil. The line between saints and sinners runs down the middle of my being. .. I destroy my propaganda machine that automatically casts me in a favorable light and others in the shadow."

"The neurosis of normality is a case of repetition compulsion caused by the repression of awareness."