Quotes from Tracy Kidder

foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

it really did seem as though the company didn't want the project undertaken at all.

There were Colorgraphics and Summagraphics; Altergo and C. Itoh; and Ball. "Hey, wait a minute. What's Ball doing here? Aren't they the mason jar people?" "Yeah, but they also make disk drives.

It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life.

Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.

The central belief of liberation theology - to provide a preferential option for the poor...providing medicine in the places that needed it the most...

I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.

People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be." - Paul Farmer

Just give love," it read in part. "The soul will take that love / and put it where it can best be used.

Farmer liked to tell his Harvard students that to be a good clinician you must never let a patient know that you have problems too, or that you're in a hurry.

Beyond mountains there are mountains." - Haitian proverb

Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while.

the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: "the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score.

Money is a fictional thing that is supposed to go around. Hoarding it is a sin

Business is an excuse to build a team and product is what the team does. You have to pay salaries so you need to earn a profit

Look, I don't have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.

whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic.

Nothing every happens unless you push it. Ed Rasala. 111

Listening to the man's story, Jim felt he'd been granted a privilege. This was intimate contact with life, the very thing he had missed during all those years of reading philosophy.

Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business. ~ Tom West. 130-131

The bigger game was pinball. [Tom] West had coined the term and all the old hands used it. You win one game you get to play another. You win with this machine you get to build the next. Pinball was what counted. It was the tacit promise behind signing up. 228

There are more billionaires today than ever before," Jim declared. "We are talking about wealth that we've never seen before. And the only time that I hear talk of shrinking resources among people like us, among academics, is when we talk about things that have to do with poor people.

There really was, as [Tom] West had often said, more to building a computer than designing and debugging a Central Processing Unit. Someone had to dream up its general outlines in the first place. Someone had to make sure the computer worked compatibly with the company's existing line of peripheral equipment. Someone had to set goals of cost and performance and see that they could be met. 278

A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them. It may be that techniques of management alone can't cure the problem. But clearly, for even the most potentially interesting jobs to be meaningful, there must be managers who are willing to throw away the management handbooks and take some risks.