Perspectives on Ideas March 5, 2007

Budget
472 JFK:…the Budget represented not a bureaucratic grab but loans to farmers and small businessmen, aid to education and conservation, urban renewal and area redevelopment. Sorenson, Kennedy

Bureaucracy
383 The President used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a façade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

Business
44 …and many a man is wasting the summer afternoon in labor and anxiety in losing riches, or in gaining them, when he would be wiser to flee away to some pleasant country village, or shaded lake in the forest, or wild and cool sea-beach. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches

64 In our business things move too fast to spend much time looking back. Gates, The Road Ahead.

105 Lippmann: The political art deals with matters peculiar to politics, with a complex of material circumstances of historic deposit, of human passion, for which the problems of business or engineering do not provide an analogy. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

166 In the first half-century of our own history, government had played a relatively active role in building the turnpikes, canals, harbors, railroads and schools which made subsequent economic expansion possible…since private capital will not go into these areas of low return. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

547 His [Kennedy’s] recruitment effort concentrated on businessmen…on the theory, a recurring cliché in government administration, that appointments from the business world would both disarm Congress and improve the efficiency of the agency. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

548 …McNamara’s prediction, saddling the agency with executives whose main contribution was to say at regular intervals: “That’s not the way we did it at Proctor and Gamble.” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

586 …[Kennedy] did not regard the acquisitive impulse as man’s noblest instinct nor the pursuit of profit as man’s highest calling. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

265 …unions will continue to be necessary as long as management remains stingy, possesses little social conscience, and controls its rubber-stamp board of directors. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.

410 Will insecurity [because of downsizing] lead to a deadening of creativity, risk taking, and innovation? Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.

250 Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the…business man…[who] fought to the end against any approach to rational and humane dealing with labor. Mencken, Minority Report.

230 …they worked to convert the incredibly archaic, helter-skelter operation of old Henry [Ford] to the new classic corporate style used at General Motors, with its highly accountable decentralized units, the different company operations turned into separate profit-and-loss centers where each executive would be held directly responsible and where slippage and failure would be quickly spotted. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.

131 …accounting for what we frequently see, to wit, that dull fellows prove very good men of business. Steele, 4/19/1711. The Spectator.


64 My goal is to prove that a successful corporation can renew itself and stay in the forefront. Gates, The Road Ahead.