the slippery slope.................

Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s no big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…

This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.

Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.

We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.

Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.

-Seth Godin, from this post

better.........................

 

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

-Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony

It could have been worse........................

 

..........................as us Browns fans truly know.

Yes, and..............................

 We need patience and curiosity rather than fear and reactivity.

-Tony Isola, from here

Toward better..........................

 One challenge is embracing the effective and generative approach of possibility when we’re sure that we’re entitled to grievance.

-Seth Godin, from his post Grievance and possibility

Required leadership reading.....................?

 

this triple trend...........................

The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took twelve black-and-white images, and cost over $10,000.  Today, the average camera that comes with the average smartphone shows a thousand-fold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution over Sasson's model.  And these cameras are everywhere.  In cars, drones, phones, satellites, and such, and with an image resolution that's downright spooky.  Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range.  Drones shrink that to a centimeter.  But the LIDAR sensors atom autonomous cars capture just about everything—gathering 1.3 million data points per second.
     We see this triple trend of decreasing size and cost, and increasing performance everywhere.  The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing fifty-three points and costing $119,900.  By 2010, it had shrunk to a $5 chip small enough to sit on your finger.  The "inertial measurement unit" that guided our early rockets is another example.  In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device.  Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.

-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Healthy thinking..................

No one wants to hear this right now because we’re living in scary times but things will get better eventually. They’re likely to get worse before they get better, potentially much worse, but I have faith in our human spirit to continue moving forward.

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

slow but spectacular.................

    By contrast, the African-American poet Langston Hughes sang in 1935: "O, let America be America again—/ The land that never has been yet—/And yet must be—a land where every man is free."  Free to move, to invent, to persuade, to offer a dollar, with no master in charge.  The result of liberal democracy's partial, imperfect fulfillment has been a slow but in the end spectacular approach worldwide to flourishing, in which fewer and fewer people are pushed or bossed around without their voluntarily given consent or contract.

-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey,  Why Liberalism Works:  How True Liberal Values Produce A Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All

What's the worst that could happen.......?

via

Opening paragraphs.........................

At the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes.  Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind.  'There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds.  Oh well, it was just a bad dream.'  Going to bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary.  'Let's see what's on the agenda today.'
     For thousands of years the answer to this question remained unchanged.  The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt.   Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list.  For generation after generation humans have prayed to every god, angel and saint, and have invented countless tools, institutions and social systems - but they continued to die in their millions from starvation, epidemic and violence.  Many thinkers and prophets concluded that famine, plague and war must be an integral part of God's cosmic plan or of our imperfect nature, and nothing short of the end of time would free us from them.
     Yet at the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an amazing realization.  Most people rarely think about it, but in the past few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war.  Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. ...

-Yuval Noah Harari,   Homo Deus:  A Brief History of Tomorrow

Better....................

"For the most part we make better "things" nowadays but I wonder if we are making better people."

-Michael Wade

Nature..............................

"Nature helps every man to the gratification of the thoughts which he most encourages, and opportunities are presented which will most speedily bring to the surface both the good and evil thoughts."

-James Allen,   As A Man Thinketh

On talent.................................

"If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room."

-Austin Kleon

Close enough..........................

via

There is no shame......................

....................................in losing a bet with Warren Buffett.

"Studies of human behavior repeatedly point to the inability of investors to stay the course through tough times."

-as quoted from this Ted Seides post

via

On bean counting..................

..............................................Seth Godin asks a good question:

In a competitive environment, the key question is: What would happen if we did a little better? 

full post here

The future's so bright.......................

“Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you, because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.”

-attributed to Bill Gates

source and larger image are here

GIGO...........................

"The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits"

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

the more mundane challenge.........

     Economies that are capable of sending men to the moon and producing goods and service of extraordinary complexity and innovation seem to struggle with the more mundane challenge of handling money and banking.  The frequency, and certainly severity, of crises has, if anything, increased rather than decreased over time.  In the heat of the crisis in October 2008, nation states took over responsibility for all the obligations and debts of the global banking system.  In terms of its balance sheet, the banking system had been virtually nationalize but without collective control over its operations.  That government rescue cannot conveniently be forgotten.  When push came to shove,  the very sector that had espoused the merits of market discipline was allowed to carry on only by dint of taxpayer support.  The creditworthiness of the state was put on the line, and in some cases, such as Iceland and Ireland, lost.  God may have created the universe, but we mortals created paper money and risky banks.  They are  man-made institutions, important sources of innovation, prosperity, and material progress, but also of greed, corruption, and crises.  For better or worse, they materially affect human welfare.

-Mervyn King,  The End of Alchemy:  Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy