Glen's Quotes Db (3185 total)

Where there's smoke there's fire, but where there's a vague fishy odor, it could be any number of things.

Around the corner I have a friend In this great city that has no end, Yet the days go by and weeks rush on, And before I know it, a year is gone And I never see my old friend's face, For life is a swift and terrible race, He knows I like him just as well, As in the days when I rang his bell, And he rang mine. If, we were younger then, And now we are busy, tired men. Tired of playing a foolish game, Tired of trying to make a name. "Tomorrow" I say "I will call on Jim" "Just to show that I'm thinking of him." But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes, And distance between us grows and grows. Around the corner!- yet miles away, "Here's a telegram sir - "Jim died today." And that's what we get and deserve in the end. Around the corner, a vanished friend.

A simple illustration, which I learned many years ago from managers at Kollmorgen, demonstrates my point. Imagine that you have two roller skates, attached to one another by a spring. You use the first roller skate to control the motion of the second. It’s a bit tricky, but doable. Now, add a third roller skate, attached with another spring--and, moreover, give that new spring a different "spring constant" (i.e, make it either easier or more difficult to to extend than the first spring). Now, try to control the third roller skate by moving only the first. It's much trickier. Keep adding roller skates, each attached by springs with different spring constants. It doesn't take long to give up any hope of controlling the roller skate at the far end of the line. Organizations are infinitely more complex than this simple line of roller skates and springs. You can begin to see why one person dictating orders from "one end of the line" cannot possibly control what happens in a complex organization.

...Father John Hugo talked of work, ‘That physical work was hard, mental work harder, and spiritual work the hardest of all.