A paddle here, a paddle there – the canoe stays still.
African proverb
One thing I believe to the fullest is that if you think and achieve as a team, the individual accolades will take care of themselves. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.
Michael Jordan, US basketball player (b. 1963)
Ask not what your team-mates can do for you. Ask what you can do for your team-mates.
Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, US basketball player (b. 1959)
It’s hard to work in groups when you’re omnipotent.
Q, character in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, created by Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991)
There is no limit to what a man can achieve as long as he doesn’t care who gets the credit.
Bob Woodruff, US country singer songwriter (b. 1961)
The world is moved along, not only be the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Helen Keller, US author, lecturer (1880-1968)
The longer a management team is exposed to the problems of the real world the greater is the need to be prepared for a full range of problems and situations, and to have a team ready to meet them.
Raymond Meredith Belbin, British academic, management researcher (b. 1926)
Technology
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
Alice Kahn, US author, journalist
When all else fails, read the instructions.
While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
Lee Gomes, US journalist
Conversations are the way knowledge workers discover what they know, share it with colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organisation. The panoply of modern information and communication technology – for example, computers, faxes, email – can help knowledge workers in this process. But all depends upon the quality of the conversations that such technologies support.
Alan Webber, US editor, author, presenter (b. 1948)
Increasing access to technology improves overall wealth, but also exacerbates inequality, because access benefits the information-rich the most.
John Browning, US scientist, author
The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.
John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene, US futurist authors (Naisbitt b. 1929; Aburdene b. 1968)
Like it or not, we are entering a phase in which the economy is dominated by technology – therefore dominated by increasing returns and by permanent transience instead of equilibrium.
W Brian Arthur, Irish economist (b. 1945)
Thinking
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, essayist (1856-1950)
The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein, German physicist (1879-1955)
Of one thing we can be sure. The quality of our life in the future will be determined by the quality of our thinking.
Edward de Bono, Maltese psychologist, author (b. 1933)
No one is thinking if everyone is thinking alike.
George S Patton, US general (1885-1945)
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann, US newspaper commentator, author (1889-1974)
Thought is action in rehearsal.
Sigmund Freud, Austrian founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)
Big thinking precedes great achievement.
Wilferd Arlan Peterson, US poet, author (1900-1995)
Ours is a very fast-moving field. You have to be able to step back from it. Many years ago, I decided to take a week every year and absorb myself in thinking many years ahead. I get colleagues to put together what PhD theses I should read, what products I should play with, what memos I should look at. So, it’s been, except for sleeping a little bit, day and night all by myself uninterrupted. Now, because things are moving so fast, I do it twice a year.
Bill Gates, US computer engineer, entrepreneur (b. 1955)
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you: but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
Donald Marquis, US newspaper owner, poet, playwright (1878-1937)
All the problems in the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.
Thomas J Watson, US businessman, founder of IBM (1874-1956)
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher (1813-1855)
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.
Henry Ford, US automobile manufacturer, engineer (1863-1947)
Most people would rather die than think: many do.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, mathematician (1872-1970)
Few minds wear out; more rust out.
Christian Nestell Bovee, US author, lawyer (1820-1904)
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working when you get up in the morning, and doesn’t stop until you get to the office.
Robert Frost, US poet (1874-1963)
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
Benjamin Wharf, US linguist (1897-1941)
Life does not consist mainly – or even largely – of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain, US author (1835-1910)
All the talk about labour flexibility misses the point. It’s not ways of working that need to become more flexible, it’s ways of thinking.
Simon Caulkin, British journalist
Far from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coat tails of thinking. Therefore, instead of knowledge-centred schools we need thinking-centred schools. This is no luxury, no Utopian vision of erudite and elitist education. These are hard facts about the way learning works.