Quote Unquote

There is something about quotes that makes them a favoured output of development gurus and coaches.  They contain highly contagious messages with a pithy ‘bumper sticker’ appeal that makes them perfect for the Twitter-fest of quotes that whizz past on my Twitter feed. One of the most influential quotes that I have come across and that keeps me ‘on mission’ at Poppyfish is this one:

 "Success does not happen by spontaneous combustion, you must first set yourself on fire"

I love the idea this paints. For me it sums up what Poppyfish is all about. Until today though I had no idea of the origin of the quote, it being just something that I’d carried in my head over the past few years.

I found out this morning that this quote should be sourced to a chap by the name of Arnold H Glasow.

Googling Mr Glasow doesn’t really enrich our understanding of him, the extent of my knowledge coming from the following:

"Arnold Henry Glasow was born in Fond-du-lac, Wisconsin, USA, in 1905, and died in Freeport, Illinois in 1998 age 93. He graduated from Ripon College, and started his own business when he moved to Freeport just after the Great Depression. His business was a humour magazine that he marketed to firms nationally, which firms would turn into their own "House Organ" to send to their own customers. He ran this business for over sixty years but didn't publish his first book until aged 92. The book was titled "Glasow's Gloombusters", one of the many titles he put to his work during his career. He was cited frequently in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Chicago Tribune and many other major publications. He was a regular contributor to the humour sections of Reader's Digest. Sixty years of productive work. Many accolades. A real American thinker, self-effacing and generous of spirit, he shunned the national spotlight".

More?

Here's a few more of Glasow’s quotes (from Mistral again). Some of them are really top drawer. Pick your own favourite and make no mistake, you’ll be seeing some of these again!

"A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down".

"All some folks want is their fair share and yours".

"An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied".

"Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope".

"Improvement begins with I".

"Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects".

"Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to".

"Nothing lasts forever - not even your troubles".

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency".

"Praise does wonders for our sense of hearing".

"Success is simple. Do what's right, the right way, at the right time".

"Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath".

"The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion".

"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it".

"The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we're ready for it"

"What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Off and running...

Image
My Dad gave me a calendar yesterday. It was one of those desktop ones on which every date there is a new ‘thought for the day’. I’m not really sure of the theme, Dad had used a few days of it himself so the cover was long gone. In general I suppose the quotes, most which are attributed to 'great thinkers' throughout history,would be considered as ‘life tips’. Not my dear old Dad's cup of tea at all, hence the handover. He knows me well. It's off to a good start. The entry for the 12 th April reads: “ We never do anything well until we cease to think about the manner of doing it ” and is attributed to William Hazlitt. I googled Hazlitt to assess his credentials for such a statement. A contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hazlitt was a philosopher, journalist and essayist in early 19 th century Britain. According to The Hazlitt Society he became the first major drama critic in English, the first major art critic, and one of the most gifted literary and...
Read more

Business Continuity as a form of OD

Image
Is Business Continuity a form of OD? It's a bit early in the week to wire up  "The Cogitator" and consider the world of OD through my own particular lens, but as I am delivering a Business Continuity decision making exercise this week I wanted to stop for a moment to consider the connection between Business Continuity and Organisational development. Does BC = OD? Simulations provide a key opportunity for learning and offer an opportunity to analyse decision making in a safe environment and are an excellent tapestry for personal development, yet few relatively few organisations choose to run decision making exercises for this purpose. In the field of L&D overall simulations tend to be niche areas, and not always regarded as the first option. I find this rather thought provoking, especially when the role of simulations is so well established in some other areas of organisations. Take for instance the field of Business Continuity. Business Continui...
Read more

Critical Incident Timeline. Are you prepared?

Image
Understanding how a critical incident develops can help us to know what to expect when an incident happens for real. So far this year there have already been a number of high profile critical incidents affecting organisations. Most recently the escalation of the Algerian hostage crisis has been a major news story. Last week, the first ever helicopter crash in London sparked a critical incident that, whilst more local in impact, was headline news and impacted organisations caught up in the maelstrom of unfolding events.   Studying how the news unfolded in this stand alone tragic accident can help us to assess the realism of the timelines in our own continuity exercises and critical incident simulations. In this blog post I present a timeline for the helicopter incident and briefly discuss critical incidents from an organisational impact perspective. Building the timeline What I have done below is to build a timeline of the helicopter crash incident, as best as I have been ...
Read more