Carlo Cipolla: “Between 1780 and 1850 an unprecedented and far-reaching revolution changed the face of England. From then on the world was no longer the same. Historians have often used and abused the word “revolution” to mean a radical change, but no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution opened the door to a completely new world, a world of new and untapped sources of energy such as coal, oil, electricity, and the atom; a world in which man found himself able to handle huge masses of energy to an extent inconceivable in the preceding rural world.” [ via CafeHayek]
Patrick McKenzie: “The thing killing banks is a very simple idea with profound consequences. It is not a secret: when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall. This is both almost a law of nature and also perpetually underestimated in how much it affects the world outside of asset prices.”
James Gorman: “I had no fear because to me, strategy comes from fundamental beliefs about the industry structure, and then you put guiding principles around it. Not everybody got an equal vote. I had plenty of people telling me, “You’re wrong.” I said to one of them, “Okay, if I’m wrong, I’ll fail, and I won’t need to be kicked out; I’ll walk out. And maybe they’ll tap you on the shoulder and you can run the place. Until then, we’re doing it my way.””
Ginni Rometty: “I think if you shut your eyes and think about when you learned the most in life, it’ll be at times when you were in risky or uncertain situations. That crystallization made it much easier for me to take on risky changes in different jobs that were really difficult. I realized that when I put myself in those circumstances, even though it didn’t feel right on the inside, I learned a lot. I also learned that just because I may feel uncomfortable inside, it doesn’t mean I have to tell everyone that at the same time. It’s okay to be uncomfortable on the inside, and I would go on to find that to be true whether it was a person, a company, or a country.”
