Quote

We're not in cultures which support learning we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises. So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

Walter Wriston

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Walter Wriston
Age: 85 †
Born: 1919
Born: August 3
Died: 2005
Died: January 19
Banker
Middletown
Connecticut
Walter Bigelow Wriston
Look
Asking
Cultures
Nothing
Respect
Consistently
Looks
Learning
Boss
Giving
Control
Mess
Kind
Mistake
Message
Make
Support
Messages
Predictability
Culture
Mistakes
Compliance
Give
Surprise
Surprises

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The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.
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Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.
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The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.
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Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.
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Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible ... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.
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All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.
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Information about money is more important than money itself.
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If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
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The guy with the competitive advantage is the one with the best technology.
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It is a maxim of cryptology that what one man can devise, another can unravel. This principle keeps armies of tax lawyers and accountants employed, but adds nothing to our national productivity.
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Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead.
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Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.
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Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.
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The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.
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One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago.
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Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.
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The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.
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Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven it can only be attracted.
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I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.
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Risk is not a dirty word.
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