Noah > Noah's Quotes

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
― Fred Rogers

“A central tenet of the traditional command-and-control mentality is management by the numbers; this is the basis and means for decision making. The numbers are largely financial and activity-related (what people do), which may or may not be of value to understanding and improving the system. With a proclaimed interest in ‘shareholder value,’ senior managers sit astride a system that they make more unstable and suboptimal through financial interference. Almost without thinking about it, the purpose of the organization becomes ‘make the budget.’ As”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“As with any target, in the pursuit of this purpose managers actually make performance worse—by ‘managing costs,’ for example, they create (more) costs. If only they knew. In pursuit of economies of scale, managers of service organizations build factories to handle work and worsen service, but they remain unaware of the extent of the damage, because their measures, being activity- rather than purpose-related, keep them blind. Top-down”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“Maximizing the ability to handle variety is central to improving service and reducing costs. The systems approach employs the ingenuity of workers in managing and improving the system. It is intelligent use of intelligent people; it is adaptability designed in, enabling the organization to respond effectively to customer demands. Workers”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“As managers develop the systems approach, they learn to use computers for the things they are good at and to the contrary avoid using computers for things that people are good at. The consequences are fewer computer systems and more control. I”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. David Wellman succinctly summarizes racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”17 These advantages are referred to as white privilege, a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, schools, etc.).18 But let me be clear: stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“To justify these contradictory rulings, the court stated that being white was based on the common understanding of the white man. In other words, people already seen as white got to decide who was white.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White history is implied in the absence of its acknowledgment; white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White supremacy describes the culture we live in, a culture that positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal. White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports this idea—the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism