Immigrants To Canada

"“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August."

"If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous."

"What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation."

"It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us."

"You’re always, as a journalist, walking this fine line between faithfully representing the complexity of the thing you’re writing about and retaining your readers. The finest piece of journalism in the world is of no use if no one reads it. And getting people to read it requires compromises and sacrifices and all kinds of things. It is very hard to get it perfectly right. But I feel like over time, most good journalists, I think, do a pretty good job of balancing those things…"

"…You can’t separate race from police shooting cases, but you also can’t say that’s the whole story. There’s something out of whack with the way we’ve structured relationships—not just between police officers and civilians, but between strangers of all kinds."

"The problems with framing it in terms of race is not that it is inaccurate, it absolutely is effective…but the minute you raise race, you derail the conversation and it becomes possible to dismiss this whole story as a story about a racist cop. Now he may be a racist cop, but that is not the issue, the issue is that the system with the best intentions set him up in a certain way."

"The bottom line is that civil society simply cannot function without default to truth…I can’t converse with you, for instance, if I subject every statement that comes out of your mouth to critical scrutiny before I accept it as true. Conversation cannot proceed without default to truth."

"I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph. My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished."

"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins."

"Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others."

"People are my favourite subject because there are no two alike, so my work never becomes routine."

"He is down-to-earth and a grassroots man who actually built the system."

"We have to be realistic about the history of [touch-screen] technology. We have to remember that this is not new — this has been done, this has been tried before."

"I couldn't type on it and I still can't type on it, and a lot of my friends can't type on it. It’s hard to type on a piece of glass."

"You have to build an industry. You have to be very nimble, and you have to be connected to your customers, and that can't be done with just one company."

"At the very core of RIM — at its DNA — is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable."

"In five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model. … In five years, I see BlackBerry to be the absolute leader in mobile computing."

"History repeats itself again, I guess. The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don't innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old."

"Gareth Morgan provides a rich and comprehensive resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations internationally, translating leading-edge theory into leading-edge practice."

"Gareth Morgan is best known as the creator of the concept of 'organisational metaphors' as a management tool. His greatest insight has been to determine that, while there is no one model of organisation that can entirely capture the essence of organisation, it is possible by means of metaphors to look at organisations from different angles and see different facets"

"Look for every seed of enthusiasm, and try to build pockets of success."

"In highlighting the role of the unconscious in organization, there is a danger that many will now want to find ways of managing the unconscious as well. This, of course, is impossible, because the unconscious is, by nature, uncontrollable."

"Dialectical analysis thus shows us that the management of organization, of society, and of personal life ultimately involves the management of contradiction."

"Though we may in quiet times confront the fact that we are going to die, much of our daily life is lived in the artificial realness created through culture. This illusion of realness helps to disguise our unconscious fear that everything is highly vulnerable and transitory."

"In order to live in harmony with one another, humans must moderate and control their impulses, and that the unconscious and culture were thus really two sides of the same coin."

"Patriarchy operates as a kind of conceptual prison, producing and reproducing organizational structures that give dominance to males and traditional male values."

"While they create a way of seeing and suggest a way of acting, they also tend to create ways of not seeing, and eliminate the possibility of actions associated with alternative views of the world."

"Conflict may be personal, interpersonal, or between rival groups or coalitions. It may be built into organizational structures, roles, attitudes, and stereotypes or arise over a scarcity of resources. It may be explicit or covert. Whatever the reason, and whatever the form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests."

"Power is the medium through which conflicts of interest are ultimately resolved. Power influences who gets what, when, and how."

"Any system that insulates itself from diversity in the environment tends to atrophy and lose its complexity and distinctive nature"

"Contingency theorists suggest that we can best proceed by appointing 'the right people' to the job we have in mind, and by creating flexible authority, communications, and reward structures that will motivate them to satisfy their own needs through the achievement of organizational goals."

"To self-regulate, learning systems must be able to 1. Sense, monitor and scan significant aspects of their environment, 2. Relate this information to the operating norms that guide system behavior 3. Detect significant deviations from these norms, and 4. Initiate corrective action when discrepancies are detected. If these four conditions are satisfied, a continuous process of information exchange is created between a system and its environment, allowing the system to monitor changes and initiate appropriate responses. In this way, the system can operate in an intelligent, self-regulating manner."

"Imaginization is about improving our abilities to see and understand situations in new ways."

"As we look around the organizational world we begin to see that it is possible to identify different species of organization in different kinds of environments. Just as we find polar bears in arctic regions, camels in deserts, and alligators in swamps, we notice that certain species of organization are better ‘‘adapted’’ to specific environmental conditions than others. We find that bureaucratic organizations tend to work most effectively in environments that are stable or protected in some way and that very different species are found in more competitive and turbulent regions, such as the environments of high-tech firms in the aerospace and microelectronics industries."

"Groups and departments often attempt to incorporate key skills and resources within their boundaries and to control admissions through selective recruitment."

"Organizations are complex and paradoxical phenomena that can be understood in many different ways. Many of our taken-for-granted ideas about organizations are metaphorical, even though we may not recognize them as such. For example, we frequently talk about organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve predetermined goals and objectives, and which should operate smoothly and efficiently. And as a result of this kind of thinking, we often attempt to organize and manage them in a mechanistic way, forcing their human qualities into a background role. By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought possible before."

"Consider, for example, the mechanical precision with which many of our institutions are expected to operate. Organizational life is often routinized with the precision demanded of clockwork. People are frequently expected to arrive at work at a given time, perform a predetermined set of activities, rest at appointed hours, and then resume their tasks until work is over. In many organizations, one shift of workers replaces another in methodical fashion so that work can continue uninterrupted twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. Often, the work is very mechanical and repetitive. Anyone who has observed work in the mass-production factory or in any of the large “office factories” processing paper forms such as insurance claims, tax returns, or bank checks will have noticed the machine-like way in which such organizations operate. They are designed like machines, and their employees are in essence expected to behave as if they were parts of machines."

"Organization always hinges on the creation of shared meanings and shared understandings, because there have to be common reference points if people are to shape an align their activities in an organized way."

"An organization has no presence beyond that of the people who bring it to life."

"Bureaucracy can have dehumanizing effect upon employees, making them more like machines, especially those at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy"

"Many organizations and their managers drive toward the future while looking through the rear-view mirror. They manage in relation to events that have already occurred, rather than anticipate and confront the challenges of the future."

"In the most basic sense, imaginization invites a way of thinking. It encourages us to become our own theorists and to feel comfortable about acting on the basis our insights. It invites us to develop a skill that I believe we all have, even though we may not realize that this is the case. By recognizing this, and thinking creatively and intelligently about ourselves and our situations, we can 'push the envelope' on our realities and reshape them positively."

"The organization as a coalition of diverse stakeholders is a coalition with multiple goals."

"The metaphor suggests that different environments favor different species of organizations based on different methods of organizing and that congruence with the environment is the key to success."

"I participate, therefore I am."

"We Canadians think that Canada is a modern, well informed democracy. We look down our noses at the dumbed down content on Fox News and CNN, without noticing that we are rapidly heading in the same direction."

"The role of the individual MP has been sidelined by the power of the Cabinet, and now by the PM alone."

"“I’d rather have no Green seats and Stephen Harper lose, than a full caucus that stares across the floor at Stephen Harper as prime minister, because his policies are too dangerous,” she told the Toronto Star."

"Little wonder that the dumbing down of the political discourse, the attack ads and war rooms reign triumphant. The fifth estate is an enabler in this addiction to political trivia in place of reasoned debate."