Business

"Since the concentric organization chart has neither top nor bottom, the interpretations of the relationships existing within the organization are not dependent upon the position of the diagram which represents them. Any organization chart is designed to present certain facts about a given organization at given time. These facts or relationships do not depend on viewing the organization from any particular angle or any specific position, which is also the case for the concentric organization chart. However, with the traditional organization chart, the relationships which it intends to portray can be interpreted properly only when the chart is presented to the viewer in a certain position, that is, with the top at the top and the bottom at the bottom. Should this not be done, the organization should be upside down Should this not be done, the organization would be upside down, with relationships existing inversely to the facts of the organizational structure."

"The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago."

"In the last few years, an information resources management concept has emerged as a focus of managing information activities. Although lacking a concise or universal definition, the IRM concept has become a framework for planning more responsive and coordinated information management organization structures throughout Government and the private sector. In brief, IRM is viewed as an integration of management responsibilities for the control of information-related activities and related processes. It includes the planning and management of information collection, use, and dissemination as well as management of information technology."

"You cannot run your business, or anything else, on a theory."

"The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly."

"Pan Am takes good care of you. Marks & Spencer loves you. Securicor cares. I.B.M. says the customer is king. At Amstrad, we only want your money!"

"Organizations are defined from the inside out: they are described by who reports to whom, by departments and processes and matrices and perks. A business, on the other hand, is defined from the outside in by markets, suppliers, customers, and competitors."

"The toughest thing about the power of trust is that it's very difficult to build and very easy to destroy. The essence of trust building is to emphasize the similarities between you and the customer."

"Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement."

"As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product."

"Users can work with analysts and object designers to formulate and tune system requirements. People from business, analytical and object design disciplines can come together, learn from each other and generate meaningful descriptions of systems that are to be built. Each participant and each project has slightly different concerns and needs. Practical application of use cases can go a long way to improve our ability to deliver just what the customer ordered."

"The golden rule for every business man is this: 'Put yourself in your customer's place.'"

"Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy."

"Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most [US] companies did not until the laws required them to. It's in the best interest of organisations - when they're attacked and information is stolen - to tell nobody."

"There is one thing we are quite passionate about — and that is serving the customers who have trusted us."

"When you stop talking, you've lost your customer. When you turn your back, you've lost her."

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."

"If customers leave without a purchase, you have not failed. But if customers leave without a smile, you have."

"Your product is a starting point. A loyal customer is the goal."

"The right measure is not how many customers you've got, but how closely you hold them."

"Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that individual customer who's voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That's who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it's not up to par, it's our fault, plain and simply."

"Delighted customers are the only advertisement everyone believes."

"Customers can be asked about a product's evolution, but not its revolution."

"Although the '60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter-life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We don't need to return to that counterculture, but we do need to take up its challenge again. If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work. We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things? Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what programs to watch on TV and what model car to buy."

"Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense."

"Somewhere in the past. organizations were quite simple, and 'doing business' consisted of buying raw material from suppliers, converting into products, and selling it to customers... For the most part owner-entrepreneurs founded such simple business and worked along with members of their families. The family-dominated business still accounts for a large portion of the business start today."

"A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business."

"Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families."

"It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the Constitution, to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay any tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected."

"A company's culture is often buried so deeply inside rituals, assumptions, attitudes, and values that it becomes transparent to an organization's members only when, for some reason, it changes."

"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."

"What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies."

"We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture."

"I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."

"Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they're getting their money back. So it isn't selfishness as much as a misunderstanding."

"New Deal liberalism broke with progressivism in many if not most respects. Progressives wanted technocratic economic planning. By the 1940s, New Dealers dropped planning for Keynesianism. Most progressives were nativists who supported immigration restriction on ethnic or cultural grounds. New Deal liberals celebrated the melting pot and liberalized American immigration laws in the 1960s. Woodrow Wilson resegegrated Washington. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security and Johnson created Medicare. Wilson opposed national health insurance."

"It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label."

"Almost half of the bankruptcies in the United States are connected to an illness in the family, whether people had health insurance or not. Middle-class Americans, who had the misfortune of either experiencing a medical emergency themselves or watching a family member suffer, were then forced to face the daunting task of pulling themselves out of debt. Bankruptcy law has allowed them to start over. It has given hope. Now this new law will put people on their own. Illness or emergency creates medical bills. We are telling the people that they themselves are to blame. At the same time, we are removing protections that would stay an eviction, that would keep a roof over the head of a working family. We allow the credit industry to trick consumers into using subprime cards, with exorbitant interest rate hikes and fees. Then we hand those same consumers over to an unforgiving prison of debt, to be put on a rack of insolvency and squeezed dry by the credit card industry. We are protecting the profits of the credit card industry instead of protecting the economic future of the American people. Americans are left on their own. That's what this Administration's "Ownership Society" is all about — you're on your own — and your ship is sinking."

"Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix."

"The demutualization of property and casualty insurers raises a series of conceptual and practical problems. The assets of a mutual are essentially community assets built-up over the generations of those living in the community."

"What, exactly, is the cost of this inaction? Estimates of the total national cost of medical malpractice range from $20 billion to $45 billion annually. But this number hardly tells the whole story. There also is the more hidden cost of defensive medicine, including unnecessary testing and second opinions that send patients scurrying through processes that would not otherwise be ordered and deepen the financial burden of America’s health care system by an estimated three percent of our country’s total health care expenditures. Who ultimately pays these costs? Reckless doctors? Faceless insurance companies? Seldom mentioned, the totality of these expenses ultimately falls exclusively on the consumer, since each malpractice award translates ultimately to increased malpractice insurance premiums, which, in turn, translates to either higher health care costs, fewer physicians (with less competitive pricing pressure), or both."

"Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy."

"Among the phenomena, of the causes of which we are ignorant, there are some, such as those dealt with by the manager of a life insurance company, about which the calculus of probabilities can give real information."

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

"[Corporate programming] is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful."

"The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish."

"I'm constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don't train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business."

"Microeconomics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations on a more personal scale. It deals with the decisions that individuals and organizations make on such issues such as how much insurance to buy, which word processor to buy, or what prices to charge for their products or services."