All day long I save time;
Yet when each day is finished,
I check my account and
My balance has diminished.

A meeting moves at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. (In other words, all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused.)

Different isn't always better, but better is always different.

Fashion is about getting customers to forget about math.

Generations of presenters have adopted the K.I.S.S principle -- Keep It Simple Stupid. This is the K.I.S.S. of D.E.A.T.H. for audience concentration, however. The speaker, sensing inattention, simplifies still more. This downward spiral ends in the Lucidity Paradox: the speaker's points eventually become so clear they disappear.

In the absence of free thinking, college has become vo-tech for bureaucrats. A diploma proves that you are already a card-carrying bureaucrat, that you are willing to do what you are told for years at a time. Thus, you are qualified to work for major corporations.

I used to drive a Volvo because I was such a rational guy. Now I see that I drove it to feel rational, to indulge in a feeling-rational fashion. I needed to feel professional and wise and above mere fashion. I was driving a feeling.

Remember your math teacher saying, "Name any number and I can name one bigger"? Some schlump would fall for it and say, "A zillion" and the teacher would respond smugly, "A zillion and one." It's like that with jobs -- name a terrible job and I can name one worse. You say, "A guy who cleans up after autopsies in the morning and empties septic tanks in the afternoon." I say, "His assistant."

School is to learning what "Cliff's Notes" is to literature.

Spend a hundred bucks on giving your wife 10 Wal-Mart bras for Valentine's Day and what have you given her? Grounds for divorce. (on the $100 Victoria's Secret bras)

Successful organizations are programmed to eat their own brains: it's called bureaucracy and it's the evil offspring of Operations and Accounting. It's the silent killer of organizations; they become enfeebled before noticing that something's gone wrong.

The company calls it "downsizing" or "rightsizing." My own informal "Name the Layoff" contest produced some other euphemisms: Retroactive Hiring Freeze, Resume Revision Days, Amway Opportunity Time, and Corporation Lite.

The more time and people devoted to a decision, the more likely it is to be wrong...The more people involved in a decision, the more likely it is to be prudent. So if everyone agrees, it can't be right. Prudence kills.

The people who accomplish the most are rarely the most visionary, just the most experimentary, the ones who say "I don't know. Let's do it anyway."

There are a hundred ways to overcome an obstacle and one sure way not to -- self-pity.

Unless it's your job to carry heavy objects around, your company did not hire you for your body. Your company would rather you did not have a body -- something else to go wrong. The purpose of all business dressing is to turn your legs and torso into an attractively upholstered vehicle for transporting your head.

[W]e are so steeped in athletics that we could be considered an athletic culture, except for the fact that almost everyone is out of shape.

When the choice is settling versus failing, fail.

[W]hen you go to the Placement Office, think about the sort of companies that would want to come to a university to hire employees. Ask yourself, If these corporations are such a great places to work, why are they the only ones other than the Army to have "recruiters"?

Why are CEO's who slash jobs so proud of themselves? Instead of bragging about "cutting fat," they ought to be getting up before their employees and saying, "We did such a lousy job of planning and hiring that we have more people than work. And we are so broke and so dim-witted that we can't come up with any way to get more work. So our only solution is to send a lot of good people home. I am ashamed and I am sorry."

You could see it in the way she carried herself: she was the kind of employee always looking for nothing to do.

You take a dozen lively, intelligent people, put them in a conference room, then leap out of the way of falling IQ's. Successful managers hide their "meeting senility" and appear interested even while napping. What begins as a Meeting of the Minds soon becomes a Meeting of the Thoughtful Expressions.