Top quotes on Change & Trust by Stephen Covey

7Habits-Covey

I’ve first read this book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in the 90’s – timeless inspiration!

 

 

 

 

  1. “There are three constants in life – change, choice and principles.”
  2. “Make time for planning; Wars are won in the general’s tent.”
  3. “Be proactive.” 
  4. “Begin with the end in mind.”
  5. “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage – pleasantly, smiling, nonapoloegetically – to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”
  6. “Put first things first.”
  7. “Think win-win.”
  8. “Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.” 
  9. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. Most people listen with the intent to reply.”
  10. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.”
  11. “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” 
  12. “Treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.” 
  13. “The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.” Leadership is a choice, not a position.” 
  14. “I am not a product of my circumstances, I am a product of my decisions.” 
  15. “Strength lies in differences not in similarities.” 
  16. “Listen with your eyes for feelings.” 
  17. “The way we see the problem is the problem.” 
  18. “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” 
  19. “Accountability breeds response-ability.” 
  20. “Highly proactive people don’t blame circumstances, conditions or conditioning for their behaviour. Their behaviour of their own conscious choice.” 
  21. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” 
  22. “Be a light not a judge. Be a model not a choice. be part of the solution not part of the problem.” 
  23. “He who has a why can deal with any what or how.” Stephen Covey
  24. “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.” 
  25. “The only thing that endures over time is the Law of the Farm. You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate, and water it if you expect to reap the harvest.”
  26. “A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.” 
  27. “Courage is not the absence of fear but the awareness that something else is more important.” 
  28. “To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before you need to start doing things you’ve never done before.” 
  29. “Live out of your imagination, not your history.” 
  30. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” 
  31. “Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom. The power to choose, to respond, to change.” 
  32. “I teach people how to treat me by what I will allow.” 
  33. “Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else trie to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.” 
  34. “You can change the fruit without changing the root.” 
  35. “Our character is basically a composite of our habits because they are consistent. Often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.” 
  36. “Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.” 
  37. “If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control – myself.” 
  38. “Once you have a clear picture of your priorities that is values, goals, and high leverage activities, organise your life around them.”
  39. “What you do has greater impact than what you say.”

 

Also see quotes from Peter Drucker

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Insightful Quotes on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) today, is a practical reality. It captivated the minds of geniuses and materialised through science fiction as I grew up. During the past 70 years (post WWII) AI has evolved from a philosophical theory to a game changing emerging technology, transforming the way digital enhances value in every aspect of our daily lives.

Great minds have been challenged with the opportunities and possibilities that AI offers.  Here are some things said on the AI subject to date. Within these quotes, the conundrum in people’s minds become clear – does AI open up endless possibilities or inevitable doom?

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”; Alan Turing (1950)

“It seems probable that once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”; Alan Turing

“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”; John McCarthy (1956)

“AI scientists tried to program computers to act like humans without first understanding what intelligence is and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of building intelligent machines, the intelligence … before we attempt to build intelligent machines we have to first understand how the brain things, and there is nothing artificial about that.”; Jeff Hawkins

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”; Edsger Dijkstra

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”; Arthur Clarke (2010)

“…everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence. We cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.”; Stephen Hawking and colleagues wrote in an article in the Independent

“Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren’t the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn’t it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? …Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today’s ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. …Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!”; Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works

“Ask not what AI is changing, ask what AI is not changing.”; Warwick Oliver Co-Founder at hut3.ai (2018)

“Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don’t know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.”; Charles Yu

“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.”; Amit Ray

“We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy …”; Barrack Obama

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russian, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”; Vladimir Putin

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, I’d probably say that. So we need to be very careful.”; Elon Musk

“Whenever I hear people saying AI is going to hurt people in the future I think, yeah, technology can generally always be used for good and bad and you need to be careful about how you build it … if you’re arguing against AI then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents, and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick.”; Mark Zuckerberg

“Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake. We need to solve the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true AI.”; Yan Lecun

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we’re working on.”; Larry Page,  Co-Founder at Google (2000)

If you had all of the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” – Sergey Brin Co-Founder at Goolgle (2004)

 

 

 

10 Peter Drucker Quotes that challenges Business Leadership thinking

Drucker is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice. In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker,” and later in his life considered knowledge-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.

  1. What gets measured gets improved.”
  2. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
  3. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”
  4. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
  5. Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”
  6. “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
  7. Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”
  8. “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
  9. Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
  10. Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”

Quotes to shape Principles of Business Leadership

“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” – Dale Carnegie

“There are only two ways to live life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” – Albert Einstein

“Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.” – Andrew Carnegie

“The true measure of a person is how they treat someone who can do him absolutely no good.” – Samuel Johnson

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

“Expect more than others think possible.” – Howard Schultz

“If people aren’t calling you crazy, you aren’t thinking big enough.” – Richard Branson

“Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill