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The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them.

Paul Saffo

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Paul Saffo
Age: 54
Essayist
Professor
Paul L. Saffo
People
Hired
Uncertain
Risk
Environment
Best
Even
Always
Love

More quotes by Paul Saffo

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My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.
Paul Saffo
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I worry about a society that can remember everything.
Paul Saffo
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I live on a canyon at the edge of San Mateo. We are fortunate to have lots of suburban wildlife as our neighbors, though I kind of wish the rattlesnakes would stop curling up by our back door.
Paul Saffo
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Never mistake a clearer view for a short distance just because the technology looks like it's about to arrive in the very near future. Chances are there will be some surprises and in the long run even the most expected of futures tends to arrive late and in completely unexpected ways.
Paul Saffo
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It's interesting to see the lament of each generation overwhelmed by the next new tool. I can show you passages from scholars of Germany in the 1480s lamenting the fact that they are overloaded with all this stuff to read because of the printing press.
Paul Saffo
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Responding to climate change will become the obsession of the next decade in much the same way terrorism was this decade's obsession.
Paul Saffo
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I'm actually an optimist about what lies ahead. Are wikis reliable? It depends on the specific business. Is Wikipedia reliable? You bet. Wikipedia is a researcher's dream.
Paul Saffo
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I think it is just a matter of time before we have literal ghosts in the machine so you can create an alter ego of yourself that learns from your social experiences and extends a life even if you're no longer in the game or you are no longer alive.
Paul Saffo
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Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.
Paul Saffo
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I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, It's not a bug. It's a feature.
Paul Saffo
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More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.
Paul Saffo
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Point of view is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum... In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources...
Paul Saffo
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We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.
Paul Saffo
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Each time you toss out a 'singing' greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950.
Paul Saffo
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I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer forecaster, but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.
Paul Saffo
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This new world of personal media - the Web, the Internet and et cetera - not only delivers the world to your living rooms, but everywhere. And we get to answer back. And we're expected to answer back.
Paul Saffo
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It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.
Paul Saffo
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You don't want to rely on an expert to tell you what lies ahead.
Paul Saffo
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Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.
Paul Saffo
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Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.
Paul Saffo