Status-Q

I do like collecting quotations.  Here are some of the references to them on this blog, and I also have a collection of favourites here.

But one thing you quickly discover, if you dig a little deeper, is that a large proportion of the most popular favourites cannot be traced reliably to the people to whom they are commonly attributed.  

And here’s the latest example I’ve found… If you’ve done anything related to innovation or product design, you’ve probably heard Henry Ford’s famous comment:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!”

This is pretty well-known, but, once again, there seems to be very little evidence that he ever actually said it.  There’s a nice examination of the story on the Quote Investigator site.

If you’re like me, for some reason, you find this slightly disappointing.  But it’s hard to work out quite why.  Is it because, if we agree with a sentiment, and we then find that Henry Ford agrees with it too, it somehow validates our opinion?  “You know, Henry Ford agreed with me on this…”

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, and you can find further discussion of this idea by clicking on the image below.

I had heard this before, but came across it again today and liked it anew.  It’s from Paul Batalden, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire:

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

It’s worth taking a moment to ponder that, for whatever kind of ‘system’ you may encounter in daily life!  The corollary, I guess, is that you can only change the overall results by changing something in the system that produced them.

Now, I know from long experience that as soon as you refer to a quotation, it turns out not actually to be from the person to whom it’s normally attributed.  There are lots of examples of this in the quotes I’ve posted here, and more in the collection on my personal site.   If Albert Einstein, for example, had been busy saying all the insightful things he is supposed to have said, he wouldn’t have had time to develop Special Relativity into the more all-encompassing General Relativity.

 But in this case, there is a nice article by Paul Batalden explaining the origins of the quote.  It came, via a chain of references, from Arthur Jones, an employee of Proctor & Gamble, who originally said:

“All organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get!”

For many people, an organisation is the type of system where this is most poignant, but it applies to other things as well.

Batalden took the concept and broadened it from the special case of an organisation to the more widely-applicable one of a ‘system’ and so it became more useful as an idea…  much like General Relativity!

My French friend Cyril receives Status-Q updates by email, and after yesterday’s post concerning hobbies, he sent me another quote about holidays:

“Les vacances, c’est la période qui permet aux employés de se souvenir que les affaires peuvent continuer sans eux”. — E.J Wilson

or, roughly,

“A vacation is the time that allows employees to remember business can continue without them.”

I love this. I learned a very important lesson many years ago as the CEO of a small, fast-moving technology startup…

I think the company was only about six or seven people at the time, and we were in that classic startup mode: working mostly from a garden shed, having conversations every other day with investors or potential investors, watching the cashflow very carefully while convincing potential customers of our robust credentials and our ability to deliver.

But I wanted/needed to take a short holiday. Having gone from one startup to the next, I hadn’t had one for quite a long time and for various reasons I needed to take it now to coincide with other family plans. But I was torn: could I really leave this small team without their leader at such a critical time? What would the investors think? And so on…

In the end, I did decide to go, had a wonderful few days’ break, and came back to the office in some trepidation to see what had manage to survive my absence.

“Hello everyone!”, I said. “I’m back!”

The team looked up from their desks, puzzled for a moment, and then said, “Oh, yes, you’ve been away, haven’t you?”

It was a humbling and enlightening experience, and I’ve never forgotten it. Nobody is indispensable. Even you.

Anyway, there’s a nice twist to Cyril’s message. When I looked at it more carefully, I realised that he hadn’t just found a nice quotation to send back to me.

It was the first line of his vacation email auto-response.

“A satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant… a defiance of the contemporary… an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked.”

— Aldo Leopold

In the early days of social media, I was at a family gathering where I fear I lost some street cred with my nephew. He was talking about ‘memes’ and he said something along the lines of “Quentin will know what those are”. Yes, I confirmed, just catching the end of the conversation. ‘Meme’ is a phrase coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene. He was exploring whether cultural ideas might reproduce and spread themselves in a similar manner to the genes for certain successful biological traits. At the time, though, my nephew was probably thinking more about pictures of kittens or celebrities overlaid with bold-faced subtitles! Still, the idea of a ‘meme’ has certainly had a fair degree of meme-like success, though it has mutated over time, and many people might be ignorant of its origin!

On the subject of origins, one of the most attractive types of meme is the one that says “Well-known person X said clever thing Y”. This was very successful long before the internet, but has truly flourished since. We all love a good quotation, particularly if we can put it on a poster with a picture of Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein. I was thinking of this recently on a call when I mentioned the famous one, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”. This is widely attributed to Albert Einstein, but probably wasn’t actually his. I have a list of some of my favourite quotes on my website, and many of them now have qualifiers alongside the attributions.

Terence Eden has just written a nice blog post on a quotation from Desmond Tutu:

A very pleasing idea, but Eden suggests that Tutu may never even have used it; in any case he almost certainly didn’t originate it. That honour is likely to go to Reginald S Lourie, a man of some eminence, but whose face, though genial enough, is much less well known than the good archbishop’s. Would this quote be as popular if it had had to spread this way?

The idea that a meme needs to attach itself to a successful organism does relate back to Dawkins’ ideas, though the effect is perhaps more closely aligned to parasitology or epidemiology than pure natural selection. (Dawkins himself was, I seem to recall, hesitant to push the meme/gene analogy too far.)

We need to be reminded of this regularly, to help us appreciate both that something isn’t necessarily true just because somebody famous said it, and that ordinary people can occasionally say extraordinary things.

As a great man^* once said, “I dream of a world where the success of a great idea does not depend on the fame or fortune of its creator.” If this is your dream too, please spread the word by retweeting the image below.

^* Me, in my shower, this morning.