Karesansui

By Lehan Winifred Ramsay

There will be no quotes on this page. Quotes are getting out of hand. Even recipe books contain quotes these days. Unfortunately it is just the beginning; Twitter is teaching people how to believe themselves to be full of wisdom and witicism. And training them to make their output entirely of quotes. Ridding consultants and other book writers of the need to troll through actual books and pull them out.

I don’t believe that half the quotes are really by the people who they’re said to be from. If I was to make a great quote, it would die a quick death. If I were to tell you all that it was really Henry Ford, perhaps it would do a few more rounds.

I have been reading some books on management, and it seems to me that a lot of people think that to be a good manager you have to go around giving out pithy little quotes that hit the ground running like a whiff of common sense. I say that probably gets people to stay watching your you-tube clip, may well bring in a thousand people to your TedTalk signing up for your daily blog-out. But otherwise, I can’t really see that it makes you a better manager.

It does though make you more popular, and a lot of people seem to think that good management equals popularity. And these days that is often the case. More and more rules are there to rid the workplace of dissent, initiative, chaos and creativity, and the result is, predictably, that we get good safe results that everyone is happy with because they cause no extra work and result in no unknowns.

Do you really think that Henry Ford had a best friend? I do not. Nor do I think that Einstein liked cats. Not only that, but I do not care if I am wrong. Which makes me a bad manager. I do not like Twitter, either.