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Almost Free: 1000 Great Quotations for Business Management & Training

 

A Kindle book by David Williams

 

 

Almost Free: 1000 Great Quotations for Business, Management & Training

First published as a GNP book

© David Williams 1998

This Kindle edition

© David Williams 2011

‘This is dedicated to the one I love’

The Mamas and the Papas (1967)

About the Author

For many years David Williams trained and facilitated groups across the UK, becoming well known for his dynamic methods of enrolling and involving seminar participants, learning groups, workshop and conference audiences. In recent years he has focused particularly on coaching other facilitators in partnership working and how to engage with groups.

He has worked with some of the world’s best-known platform speakers such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tom Peters, Warren Bennis and Benjamin Zander. His pioneering work on promoting best practice in the North of England, involving over 3,000 individuals and organizations, received widespread recognition. It featured in the MCA Business Book of the Year Becoming World Class by Clive Morton and in Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book, World Class.

David has worked with many organizations and partnerships in the public, private and voluntary sectors. He has helped establish regional business and community development programmes, and strategic programmes using a creative teamwork approach across individual organizations. He has worked with local authorities and partnership groups far and wide on partnership working and all aspects of soft skills, communication, relationships and strategy.

David has written and produced a wealth of material for publications, video, audio, TV and radio broadcasting, including the critically acclaimed motivational video Benjamin Zander: Conducting Business. His work on networking was featured in the BBC video series Biz Vision. He is the author and producer of Spectrum, an interactive CD-ROM for trainers and facilitators and Partnership Works, an interactive CD-ROM for partnership enablers and groups.

Contents

Almost Free: 1000 Great Quotations

for Business Management & Training

About the Author

Contents

Author’s Introduction to Kindle edition

Ability

Achievement

Action

Advertising

Age

Attitude

Beginnings

Brevity

Bureaucracy

Change

Change Agents

Collaboration

Commitment

Communication

Competition

Computers

Continuous Improvement

Contribution

Control

Courage

Creativity

Criticism

Curiosity

Customers

Discovery

Doubt

Dreams

Education

Empowerment

Encouragement

Enthusiasm

Environment

Excellence

Facilitation

Facts

Failure

Focus

Fun

Future

Genius

Habit

Ideas

Images

Imagination

Imitation

Individuality

Innovation

Integrity

Internet

Involvement

Journeys

Knowledge

Leadership

Learning

Listening

Measurement

Media

Mediocrity

Meetings

Mistakes

Motivation

Opportunity

Pace

Paperwork

Passion

Planning

Possibility

Power

Predictions

Presentation

Problems

Profits

Public Relations

Quality

Questions

Recognition

Reflection

Relationships

Resistance

Risk

Role Models

Rules

Self-Confidence

Selling

Size

Success

Teamwork

Technology

Thinking

Time

Trust

Value

Vision

Voice

Winning

Wisdom

Working

Author’s Introduction to Kindle edition

I compiled this collection originally because I needed it myself. That is to say, my mountain of notes, cuttings and print-outs was threatening a landslide in my store cupboard. I could lay a hand on an appropriate quotation just when I required it, provided I had two days’ notice of the occasion and nothing else to do but sift through the pile built up over several years.

The project to create a book of quotations from the best of this random collection put a semblance of order back into my life and on the way provided me with a great deal of pleasure as I rediscovered some of the wise and witty observations that stirred me enough to write them down at the time, only to bury them under my own disorder.

One of the most difficult tasks in selecting material for the book was deciding what to leave out. It is a highly subjective choice, one which is bound to reveal my own slants and prejudices. I have tried, however, to keep the reader constantly in mind. I hope you will find among the thousand odd quotations many that apply to your own experience in the world of business, management and training, even though many stem from seemingly unrelated disciplines such as sport or mass entertainment, and may have been originally spoken or written in an age quite different from the one we know today.

Although I have tried to ensure as much variety as possible and offer a wide range of authors, some names do crop up again and again. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, is a notable quotable. Ironically, he is the man who once famously said ‘I hate quotations’.

The astonishing Albert Einstein is another I keep returning to, especially for his comments on creativity and learning. Motor manufacturer Henry Ford was a master of the memorable aphorism, as was author Mark Twain.

I have tried to reflect modern management thinking with an assortment of observations from contemporary ‘gurus’, especially those I most admire and in some cases have worked with – Tom Peters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker. I do hope that the tiny nuggets of business philosophy I have scattered among these pages will inspire you to discover or renew acquaintance with their stimulating books or, in the case of those who still tread the conference platforms, go along to one of their electrifying presentations.

Not everyone represented here is well known. Biographical details on the less than famous have been difficult to come by, which is why some dates are missing. In a few cases I have not been able to say with certainty what they do or did for a living, but I have been reluctant to lose some of my favourite quotations for want of a little information. Not that I would go as far as author Anatole France who wrote:

‘When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it. Give references? Why should you? Either your readers know where you have taken the passage and the precaution is needless, or they do not know and you humiliate them.’

One of the difficulties that attitude causes the scrupulous researcher is pinning down a quotation definitively to an original source. Some of the greatest orators (President John F Kennedy for one) thought nothing of slightly altering another’s observation or simply importing it wholesale into their own ‘original’ speeches and writings. Others may have done it unconsciously. I have included a few of my own one-liners in the collection here and there, and I do hope I have not imbibed any of these from others without realising it.