Quotes About Analysis

Consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions.

While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself. One

It's more common for the students I've worked with to read too much than to read too little. They use reading as a distraction, or as a way to avoid having to think their own thoughts, or as a magic charm: "If I read everything in the field, then I'll be able to write and be sure I haven't missed anything.

I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.

But in practice, very few markets are "perfect." Porter's five forces framework offers a way to think systematically about imperfect markets.

Industry structure can be linked directly to the income statements and balance sheets of every company in the industry. The insights gained from this kind of analysis should lead directly to decisions about where and how to compete.

Strategy," Porter writes, "can be viewed as building defenses against the competitive forces or finding a position in the industry where the forces are weakest.

Customer segmentation is typically part of any good industry analysis, and choosing the customer(s) you will serve can be an important anchor in your positioning vis-à-vis the five forces. In the examples that follow, note how each reflects a different basis for segmentation: Walmart's segmentation was based on geography, Progressive's on demographics, and Edward Jones's on psychographics.

Investigating is a process of elimination. You have to explore all the possibilities, and whatever's left, no matter how implausible, has got to be it.

The way we work in public health is, we make the best recommendations and decisions based on the best available data.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

To be positive is to evaluate an approach from different angles.

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Know yourself before you decide to go around analyzing and judging other people.

Reflection cannot be seen in boiling water. The same way, truth cannot be seen in a state of anger. So, analyze before you finalize.....

Look for what's missing. Many advisors can tell a President how to improve what's proposed or what's gone amiss. Few are able to see what isn't there.

Often sound advice turns out to be totally wrong. Sometimes things turn out in such a way that only a fool would predict. Which is why fools, too, have their place in analysis and debate.

Ask for advice, and then use your brain.

You will never lose a battle if you know your own situation as well as that of the enemy.

It's difficult for most people to imagine the creative process in tennis. Seemingly it's just an athletic matter of hitting the ball consistently well within the boundaries of the court. That analysis is just as specious as thinking that the difficulty in portraying King Lear on stage is learning all the lines.

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.

Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.