Eric

“Here, paper shuffling was treated seriously, and as a task of great difficulty.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“There were two elements to look for in any draft: one was the accuracy in reflecting the deal, and the other, its omissions. The difficult part was to find out what had been left out. Frank would start with "what if" and then go through the structure of the draft and see how it worked. . . . The process of asking questions was like playing pinball. He'd run the ball through the maze and see what lit up and what didn't. He would spend ten or fifteen balls through with me, and the agreement would start to take on shape, then three dimensions and life. When its inadequacies showed, he asked the inevitable question: Could we layer on another level of complexity to account for the omissions? Of course.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“My third answer for becoming a positive deviant: Count something. Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine—or outside medicine, for that matter—one should be a scientist in the world....If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“This may come as a surprise to some of you, but Federal Express is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. I mention this because we have been spending $50,000 a month with them and there is no explanation to justify this expenditure unless it was an intercompany transfer.”
― Alan C. Greenberg, Memos from the Chairman