Fire and Knowledge

If there is a new social contract implicit between employers and employees today, it should be this: You give me your labor, and I will guarantee that as long as you work here, I will give you every opportunity—through either career advancement or training—to become more employable, more versatile.

—Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (2005), p. 292.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

—An African proverb as quote in Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (2005), p. 114.

Matt Perman instructs us how to write better emails. In our email-dominant workplace, good email communication skills are essential. For the love of your co-workers, please read this.

If you’re into productivity blogs, be sure to check out What’s Best Next. The author, Matt Perman, was my boss for four years — and he’s the most organized guy I know.

Effective management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, “like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.” No management success can compensate for failure in leadership.

—Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, p. 102.

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 106.

If you don’t create a little confusion, it’s unlikely you’ve built something remarkable.

—Seth Godin

For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable. Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless. Alone, either becomes dull. Each is the other’s discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined.

—Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wilderness” in Home Economics (1986), p. 145.