Business one-liners 101

When working hard, be sure to get up and retch every so often. When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you're you're finished with, you will need it instantly. When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer, provided of course you know that there is a problem. When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century. Jay Forrester has demonstrated it mathematically, with his computer models of cities in which he makes clear that whatever you propose to do, based on common sense, will almost inevitably make matters worse rather than better. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand, in detail, the whole system, and for very large systems you can't do this without a very large computer. Even then, the safest course seems to be to stand by and wring hands, but not to touch. Intervening is a way of causing trouble. - Lewis Thomas, from the essay "On Meddling" in the collection "The Medusa and the Snail", The Viking Press, New York, 1979 When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut. When you are right be logical, when you are wrong befuddle. When you are sure you're right, you have a moral duty to impose your will upon anyone who disagrees with you. When you are up to your butt in alligators, it is difficult to keep your mind on the fact that your primary objective was to drain the swamp. When you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal. Your own car uses more gas and oil than anyone else's.