Work Processes Quotes & Sayings

All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory. — Terry Gilliam

Several lines of evidence suggest that shallow slides are dominant erosion processes in the western Cascade Range of Oregon. Fredriksen's (1970) work based on 13 yr of data on three experimental watersheds in the experimental forest indicates that the level of slide activity is a sensitive indicator of overall erosion rate. — Unknown

Change can be frightening, and the temptation is often to resist it. But change almost always provides opportunities - to learn new things, to rethink tired processes, and to improve the way we work. — Klaus Schwab

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace. — Omar Barghouti

If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them. — Albert Ellis

Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature -the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people - all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity. Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word "natural" that we have often taken to mean "unstructured" in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.They can all be described by numbers. — Douglas Adams

Processes don't do work, people do — John Seely Brown

Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures. — Gregory Benford

It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work. — John Gurdon

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. — Andy Goldsworthy

In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions. — Daniel H. Pink

Look there are going to be, there are already adjustment processes in place but the point is that you'll actually make them work and get satisfactory outcomes if there's decent burden sharing along the way. If there's, if you like a proper transitional assistance. — John Anderson

Building smart processes to streamline the workflow can make the work easier and the results more reliable, which keeps my head above water and my clients happy. — Mark Mason

Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer. — Michael Martin Hammer

Because now I know what I have been waiting for. I know exactly why the other processes didn't work. I know I was supposed to wait for this little girl. — Nia Vardalos

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes. — David Chalmers

If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better. — Jim Highsmith

A concern that produces its own raw materials, and works them up through the various processes until it delivers the manufactured product in the domestic or foreign market, can work on a narrower margin all around, and yet do full justice to its stockholders and employees. — Charles M. Schwab

Assume responsibility for outcomes as well as for the processes and people you work with. How you achieve results will shape the kind of person you become. — C. K. Prahalad

Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills. — Henry Mintzberg

The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other. — Peter Sloterdijk

The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not. — Hilary Kornblith

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work. — Marvin Minsky

While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work. — Edmund Wilson

I believe babies are born as innovative personalities ... But our social processes work to stamp out exploration and questioning. — Jay Wright Forrester

DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic - categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum. — Joel Paris

I think the strangest thing that exists, is how there are seven billion people on the planet and yet, so many people can spend their whole lives looking for somebody to love and never, ever find that. There are so many things that we can find in other people - friendship, learning processes, enrichment - so many things, nevertheless, the most elusive and fragile of all the things we can possibly find in another human being, is love. To be the one that someone loves and for that person to be the one that you love. Why is this difficult to find? My answer is that, because out of the seven billion, there really is only one. You don't find something and make it work; you find the one and when you do, you work until it works. The problem is finding the one. Many, many people are born and die never finding that. — C. JoyBell C.

Democratic Development is a process of political struggle in which democrats work gains the upper hand in the society over non-democrats which directs aid at core political processes and institutions especially elections, political parties and politically oriented civil groups. — David Eddings

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change. — Peter Drucker

All I know for sure is that dreams are the pictures of states wanting to turn into processes. Dreams are maps of the beginning of an otherwise unchartered trip into the unknown. They are pictures of the unknown which appear in many channels. Because process work is body-oriented, I put a stress upon feelings, but dreams are not pictures of just feelings; they are pictures of the way the unknown is showing itself in a given moment. — Arnold Mindell

Arya Maloney updates the basis and practice of transpersonal psychology by using the spiritual principles of India's masters and the transformational alchemy inherent in his clients' processes. His work is both enlightening and informative. — Arnold Mindell

Genius loci cannot be designed to order. It has to evolve, to be allowed to hapen, to grow and change from the direct efforts of those who live and work in places and care about them...No matter how sophisticated technical knowledge may be, the understanding of others' lives and problems will always be partial. Just as outsiders cannot feel their pain, so they cannot experience their sense of place. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to make complete places in which other poeple can live. And, in a world dominated by international economic processes and global telecommunications, there can be no return to an environment of integrated and distinctive places. — Edward Relph

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations. — Lewis Mumford

This realignment requires a knowledge of how our thought processes work and what we need to be able to meditate. — Sivanda Yoga Center

The diversity of voices, issues, approaches, and processes required to make feminism work as an inclusive social movement is precisely the kind of knotty, unruly insurrection that just can't be smoothed into a neat brand. — Andi Zeisler

To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards — Frances G. Wickes

Don't confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on - but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal. — Ed Catmull

You cannot impose a culture from the top--it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy of life, of their joy in work, and if this does not exist, the culture will not exist. Joy is a spiritual quality, an impalpable quality: that too cannot be forced. It must be an inevitable state of mind, born of the elementary processes of life, a by-product of natural human growth. — Herbert Read

The real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unaltered nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes. — Masanobu Fukuoka

You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no. — Donald Barthelme

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained. — Brian Ferneyhough

In fact, to be successful at organic beekeeping, it is even more important to learn to work with the natural biological processes and instinctive behaviors of the bees. — Ross Conrad

YouTube is so quick and so instant, and you make a video, and you can upload it the same day, whereas with a book, you have to go through a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of processes. So it was weird to sit down and work with other people on projects, because I'm so independent with YouTube. — Connor Franta

By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely. — Karl Buhler

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth. — Evelyn Underhill

Every book takes me from 35 to 41 days to write. I don't know why that is. I've tried to get it down to 30 or 31, depending on the length of the month, but it won't work. I don't drink while I'm writing because it fuddles my logical processes, but when I finish a book I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a big belt. — Rex Stout

Business intelligence is essentially timely, accurate, high-value, and actionable business insights, and the work processes and technologies used to obtain them. — Swain Scheps

Nutrients are not drugs and they can't be studied as drugs. They are part of a biological system where all nutrients work as a team to support your biochemical processes. — Mark Hyman

Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million years, and you've carved the Grand Canyon. Take the creeping pace of which the continents move (about two inches per year on average, or roughly as fast as your fingernails grow). Stretch that over thirty million years, and a continent will travel nearly 1,000 miles. Stretch that over a few billions years, and continents will have time to wander from the tropics to the poles and back, crunching together to assemble super-continents, break apart into new configurations- and do all of that again several times over. Deep time, it could be said, is Nature's way of giving the Earth room for its history. The recognition of deep time might be geology's paramount contribution to human knowledge. — Keith Meldahl

Agile Manifesto." It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology. — Jeff Sutherland

The word soul has lost its meaning and even its plausibility ... Faith, hope and love can no longer be seen simply as virtues or graces; they are processes in flesh and blood ... (the clergyman) will find that whether he wants it or not, he is also a front-line mental health worker or he will be so regarded by the specialists in mental health. It is on the pastoral role and the tasks of shepherding that the psychological disciples have the greatest impact in theological work. — Paul Pruyser

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today. — Paul R. Pillar

Such examples should alert one to the fact that falling in love and staying in love
may be two rather different processes. The first is based mainly on immediate attraction,
while the second will require negotiation, compromise, and a far better understanding
of both oneself and one's partner. Falling in love is grand; staying in love is hard work. — Frank D. Cox

It is possible for the assembly-line worker consigned to tightening the bolts on the transmission and the office worker who processes medical insurance claims to work with pride and efficiency, but it's not easy to maintain that attitude. — Paul Hawken

I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to "buy" a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don't work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will - all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based. — Stephen R. Covey

God's way of being alive is distinguishable from other forms of life. Plants, animals, and humans enjoy life at different scales of consciousness, movement, and self-determination. But in all plants, animals, and humans, bodily life ends in death. From the moment of conception, the processes of decay and death are at work in our bodies. Not so in God's life. God's life is eternally alive. God's life is not only without end but without beginning. — Thomas C. Oden

Most Business Processes Are 90% Waste and 10% Value-Added Work — Jeffrey K. Liker

If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world. — Alva Noe

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. — Harry S. Truman

I think certain types of processes don't allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform - or perhaps distort - yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality. — Haruki Murakami

When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work is only limited by his creative vision. — Edward Weston

Sadhana You can experiment: arrange the best possible meal for yourself, get angry with something, curse the whole world, and then eat it. You will see that day how food behaves within you. At the next meal, approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you. (Of course, if you're sensible, you'll ignore the first and only do the second!) Most people can bring down the quantum of food they are eating to a third and be much more energetic and not lose weight. It is just a question of how much receptivity you have created within yourself. Accordingly your body receives. If you can do the same amount of work, maintain all the bodily processes, with thirty percent of the food that you eat, that definitely means you are running a much more efficient machine. — Sadhguru

The internal processes of muscle growth are seriously complicated, people devote their lives to it, but the external processes that kick it off, the things in your control can be distilled down to a few principles: Get stronger in the right rep ranges, eat appropriately, commit to the program and consistently work hard at it. — Daniel Roberts

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story. — Paul Broks

You are nothing unless it comes from your heart. Passion, caring, really looking to create excellence. If you perform functions only and go to work only to do processes, then you are effectively retired. And it scares me - most people I see, by age twenty-eight are retired. — John C. Maxwell

You're always learning so much from people and how they work and what their processes are. Some people like to listen to music before they get into it, and some people can talk all the way up to, "Action!" Everybody is different. — Evan Peters

Your processes are amazingly fast, yet flexible, and the people at Screaming Circuits, from finance to the factory floor, are all knowledgeable and a joy to work with. — Jonathan Friedman

We think we have the best matching algorithm, we think we have the best members. So why wouldn't we want to just shine the light onto just how our processes work, what the real data are, and let people come to their own conclusions. — Sam Yagan

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought. — Charles Spurgeon

Let us ask ... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc ... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. — Michel Foucault

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization's culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the — Clayton M Christensen

With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms. — William E. Connolly

When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. — K. Anders Ericsson

Once an organization begins to stabilize its processes, an amazing thing happens! More time becomes available to concentrate on the longer-term, strategic issues that will move the organization forward, because people have to deal with fewer exceptions and fewer variations from the norm (Standard Work). As — Michael Bremer

Vision is easy. It's so easy to just point to the bleachers and say I'm going to hit one over there. What's hard is saying, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work. — Lou Gerstner

Entrepreneurs don't do most of the work. Entrepreneurs identify the problems, discover the opportunities and then build processes to allow other people and other things to do the work. — Mike Michalowicz

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem. — Ben Horowitz

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that "childhood reading experts" continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language. — Alan Jacobs

A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being ... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state. — Jean Dubuffet

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order, The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. — James C. Scott

We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes. — W. Edwards Deming

The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. — William S. Burroughs

To boost bonding among others so they are more apt to work (or play) well together, ask them, when together, to do two powerfully simple things that can be done rather quickly:
1. Write down the ways they are like each other. Hint: Create a level playing field. Writing rather than immediately sharing helps slow thinkers keep up with fast thinkers. Fast thinkers aren't smarter, just different in their thinking processes, and each kind has advantages and pitfalls, so they can accomplish more together than when a majority in a group think and speak at the same speed. Hint: Salespeople are often fast thinkers.
2. Share with each other what they wrote, going around the circle, one by one.
Bonus benefit: Other studies show that when you reflect on how you are similar to those with whom you are talking, you pay more attention to them. You care about them more. That spurs the other person to listen more closely to you. — Kare Anderson

Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a "touch of fire," for what it has been through. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The challenge of elucidating living processes
including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit'
is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions. — Peter Atkins

Performance wasnt something that I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. I try to do that in a lot of different ways, by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives ... that people might relate to in terms of process, everyday activities- bathing, eating, etc. — Janine Antoni

The main object of the work was to present such a survey of the advances already made in physical knowledge, and of the mode in which they have been made, as might serve as a real and firm basis for our speculations concerning the progress of human knowledge, and the processes by which sciences are formed. — William Whewell

I work within the limits of what I have and know, simplicity and low impact, natural materials and processes, leaving a delicate footprint. — David Trubridge