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"If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways
to be hospitable to the unusual person.  You don't get innovation as a
democratic process.  You almost get it as an anti-democratic process.
Certainly you get it as an anthitetical process, so you have to have an
environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can
deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc.,
   "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity",
   The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

"In corporate life, I think there are three important areas which contracts
can't deal with, the area of conflict, the area of change and area of reaching
potential.  To me a covenant is a relationship that is based on such things
as shared ideals and shared value systems and shared ideas and shared
agreement as to the processes we are going to use for working together.  In
many cases they develop into real love relationships."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

Another goal is to establish a relationship "in which it is OK for everybody
to do their best.  There are an awful lot of people in management who really
don't want subordinates to do their best, because it gets to be very
threatening.  But we have found that both internally and with outside
designers if we are willing to have this kind of relationship and if we're
willing to be vulnerable to what will come out of it, we get really good
work."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

In his book, Mr. DePree tells the story of how designer George Nelson urged
that the company also take on Charles Eames in the late 1940s.  Max's father,
J. DePree, co-founder of the company with herman Miller in 1923, asked Mr.
Nelson if he really wanted to share the limited opportunities of a then-small
company with another designer.  "George's response was something like this:
'Charles Eames is an unusual talent.  He is very different from me.  The
company needs us both.  I want very much to have Charles Eames share in
whatever potential there is.'"
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

Mr. DePree believes participative capitalism is the wave of the future.  The
U.S. work force, he believes, "more and more demands to be included in the
capitalist system and if we don't find ways to get the capitalist system
to be an inclusive system rather than the exclusive system it has been, we're
all in deep trouble.  If we don't find ways to begin to understand that
capitalism's highest potential lies in the common good, not in the individual
good, then we're risking the system itself."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

Mr. DePree also expects a "tremendous social change" in all workplaces.  "When
I first started working 40 years ago, a factory supervisor was focused on the
product.  Today it is drastically different, because of the social milieu.
It isn't unusual for a worker to arrive on his shift and have some family
problem that he doesn't know how to resolve.  The example I like to use is a
guy who comes in and says 'this isn't going to be a good day for me, my son
is in jail on a drunk-driving charge and I don't know how to raise bail.'
What that means is that if the supervisor wants productivity, he has to know
how to raise bail."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988

Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it.
Some can avoid it.  Geniuses remove it.
-- Perlis's Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept.  1982

"What if" is a trademark of Hewlett Packard, so stop using it in your
sentences without permission, or risk being sued.

Now, if the leaders of the world -- people who are leaders by virtue of
political, military or financial power, and not necessarily wisdom or
consideration for mankind -- if these leaders manage not to pull us
over the brink into planetary suicide, despite their occasional pompous
suggestions that they may feel obliged to do so, we may survive beyond
1988.
-- George Rostky, EE Times, June 20, 1988 p. 45

The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be
precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly.
The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the
language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough
edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast.
-- Richard A. O'Keefe