Non Fiction Authors

"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."

"I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea."

"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose."

"Over the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money ((Bristol-Myers Squibb). Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right-sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment."

"We see, we feel, we change."

"A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time."

"In a change effort, culture comes last, not first."

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

"Valued achievements connect to people at a deeper level—and a deeper level can change behavior that is generally very difficult to change."

"The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up over the next few decades. Enterprises everywhere will be presented with even more terrible hazards and wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends"

"One of the most powerful forms of information is feedback on our own actions."

"Without conviction that you can make change happen, you will not act, even if you see the vision. Your feelings will hold you back."

"Never underestimate the power of the mind to disempower."

"Great vision communication usually means heartfelt messages are coming from real human beings."

"Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision."

"Never underestimate the power of a good story."

"No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service."

"Budgeting is a math exercise, number crunching. Planning is a logical, linear process. Strategizing requires a great deal of information about customers and competitors, along with conceptual skills. Visioning uses a very different part of the brain than budgeting. As the name implies, it involves trying to see possible futures. It inevitably has both a creative and emotional component (e.g., “How do we feel about the options?”). When you use “orthodox planning” to create a vision, frustration and failure are inevitable."

"Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word."

"Analytical tools have their limitations in a turbulent world. These tools work best when parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy."

"The heart of change is in the emotions."

"Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings."

"Leading Change describes the eight steps people follow to produce new ways of operating. In The Heart of Change, we dig into the core problem people face in all of these steps, and how to successfully deal with that problem. Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All those elements, and others, are important. But the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings."

"In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team."

"Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles."

"Whenever smart and well-intentioned people avoid confronting obstacles, they disempower employees and undermine change."

"Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with the verbal communication."

"Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones. It takes you into territory that is new and less well known, or even completely unknown to you."

"The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces satisfactory results."

"One can choose life, or choose death. Having chosen life, I must live it as it is."

"Why do I live in Israel? Because Israel lives in me, as it lives in all Jews. It is who we are. And those of us lucky enough to recognize this truth and embrace it in all its fullness and depth are the luckiest Jews in the world."

"I believe that it is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve this distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman-or watchwoman-on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight."

"When you ignore what people are saying on a daily basis, calling for the annihilation of your country, you are ignoring them at your own risk."

"Our enemies — whether Shiite or Sunni — are followers of a totalitarian ideology based on Islam, which tells them that Allah wishes to rule the world through them. Israel is a central front in this war. Given the weakness of Western support for the Jews, jihadists see attacking Israel as a strategic tool for eroding the West’s ideological defenses and shoring up their supporters throughout the world."

"Perhaps the central reason that Ahmadinejad’s message, and the hundreds of thousands of voices echoing his call throughout the world, are so dangerous is because the Free World is making precious little effort to assert its own message."

"One of the greatest problems for international journalists covering the Middle East is that people who serves as guides for journalists are often affiliated with Islamic terrorists seeking to turn for foreign visitors against Israel."

"Maintaining the illusion that I am in control is futile, lonely, and in the long run more always costly than the effort is worth."

"We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case."

"It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings."

"We make a mistake if we ask ourselves, "Am I good enough?" or "Is it worthwhile to be me?" … Whoever heard of a baby who was inadequate or a child who did not know just exactly how to be a child? How could it not be all right for me to be me? How could it not be just right for you to be you?"

"I must remember the things I have seen. I must keep them fresh in memory, see them again in my mind's eye, live through them again and again in my thoughts. And most of all, I must make good use of them in tomorrow's life."

"I know of but one meek, humble man who accomplished anything. That was more than 1,900 years ago, and I'm not so sure he was meek and humble."

"The entire Party and country should wake up, throw into the flames and twist the neck of any one who tramples underfoot the sacred law of the Party in defense of the rights of women and girls."

"Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality."

"I've noticed that whenever a woman's willin' to be imposed upon there's always a man standin' 'round ready to do the imposin'."

"It is only a plain tale of plain people told in the plain dialect of a plain old woman."

"... possibly the most Aztec-like of all Europe's remaining Stalinists."

"The Spectator, 'TWO-FACED BUZZARDS', 12 December 1987"

"The Spectator contributor Peter Kemp, who was dropped into Albania during the second world war, was later asked what he thought of Albanians. 'What can you think of a nation,' he answered, 'whose emblem is a two-faced buzzard?' Three years ago, I was with Peter Kemp in Leon, Nicaragua, when one of us spotted the news of the death of Enver Hoxha, Albania's communist leader whom Peter had known in the war. Peter rose to his feet, lifted his beer-mug, and gave the toast: 'Stoke well the furnaces of Hell!' Since Hoxha's death, his long-time interpreter has gone into exile, where he reveals that his former boss indulged in sexual practices which, in the words of the Church of England, 'fall short of the Christian ideal'. He was a rampant and aggressive sodomite who murdered many of those he embraced as well as those who refused him. The late Enver Hoxha, after the second world war, conferred with his namesake Fadil Hoxha, a senior communist in Kosovo, on whether to form an alliance. The break between Tito and Stalin put paid to the notion. Recently Fadil Hoxha fell from grace for making what he later described as a joke. To someone who had complained of the numerous rapes of Serb women in Kosovo, Hoxha replied that if more Serb women were prostitutes, there would be less rape."

"Albania's Enver Hoxha was unusual in being well read in the European literature classics - and Molotov thought his cosmopolitanism a reason for suspicion. But Hoxha was a conventional communist dictator in denying his people access to disapproved alien culture."