Insightful, Inspiring and Humorous Quotes
Contents
Regional Development
"The regions are the chapters in the book of New Zealand"
(Mike Tamaki, Regional Development Conference, 2001)
Vicki Buck
(Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"Regional economic development is probably some of the most fun you can have with your pants on."
"In many ways, I think regional economic development is very, very unpredictable."
"You can start anywhere; it doesn't matter where you start, as long as you do start."
"It means that you get to work with and for the very people who care most about your area, the people who live there."
"It means that you get to experiment and innovate, which is one of the huge advantages you have."
"The other neat thing about regional economic development is that it is incredibly democratic. Anyone can do it ? so it can be you or anyone who decides that they are going to be the leader of this in your particular area."
"The other thing about regional economic development is that there is an incredible and wonderful instant gratification."
"You don't have to know all the answers. You don't even have to know the questions and there is no way you can know all the answers. How would anybody have perfect knowledge of what is going to happen tomorrow, the next day, in three months time."
"I think we need to give ourselves and everybody around us permission to make mistakes. We will make heaps of them, some of them we may learn from, some of them we may not, we may just make them again. But we have to have permission to make mistakes."
"We were also not too proud to actually pinch other people's ideas and adapt them."
"But remember, when something happens that we should celebrate, we should give ourselves a hand at doing that. I know how bad we are at actually remembering to celebrate the things that we do; maybe it's a New Zealand feature or something."
Peter Kenyon
(Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"And in particular in terms of our young people we find that young people are deserting the regions [in Australia] in numbers we have never seen before. And fundamentally, it is about economics and jobs, it is simply about the fact that many of our regions cannot continue to provide the type of diversity of employment opportunities."
"Let me say, young people bring fresh perspectives, young people are much better collaborators than their adults, and I tell you what - young people drive the dollar far better"
"The simple challenge is that we really do need to give these young people some reason to want to return back into these regions."
"I certainly believe that New Zealand could look at the whole area of community foundations. A foundation is where local people and people with a sense of attachment to that region or to that community help to contribute to build a corpus of funding through gifts of various kinds, and where the money is invested and the interest on that is given back to their communities in terms of needs, and there is a local board that determines what the contemporary needs and opportunities are in terms of where those monies can go."
Ernesto Sirolli
(Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"I passionately believed that the wealth of a country depends more on the intelligence of its people than the abundance of its natural resources, more on its civic structure than the fertility of its soil, more on its freedom to invent and create than on the beauty of its landscape."
"There is a direct link between entrepreneurship and the wealth of nations. Prosperous regions throughout the world exhibit the same patterns of economic development, namely, a vibrant entrepreneurial sector supported by a civic culture that reassures the passion, imagination, energy and intelligence of its people."
"Regional development practitioners who will implement responsive, grassroots systems to capture the passion, energy, intelligence and resources of local entrepreneurs will be surprised at the numbers and the ideas which are latent in their regions."
"The condition for success, however, resides in allocating the same kind of energy and resources to responding to entrepreneurs that is allocated to infrastructure development. It does not make sense to be all dressed up with nowhere to go. To have beautiful infrastructures without entrepreneurs using them or strategic plans without passionate individuals to implement them is equally frustrating."
"Regional development practitioners can assist in creating an entrepreneurial economy. To do so, they have to address both the macroeconomic aspects affecting the regions, in particular, the infrastructures necessary for transport and communications, and microeconomic factors that pertain to the education, facilitation and nurturing of individual enterprise and entrepreneurs."
"The best way to look at regional development if we believe in the linkages of civic values and economic prosperity is to recognize that the success both personal and financial of every citizen is what makes a region prosperous. And our role as practitioners and civic leaders is to create the preconditions for such a culture to emerge."
"The first leg of economic development is concerned with the creation of infrastructure for development. Without roads, communication, transportation, energy, industrial land, credit, education, etc. it is very difficult for the community to survive and for local enterprise to take place."
"Infrastructure development, however, cannot replace entrepreneurship and no matter how sophisticated the local infrastructures may be, without people using them they are useless."
"There has to be a second leg to economic and community development, which balances the strategic one. This is the bottom-up responsive leg, which captures the motivation and imaginative intelligence of local passionate individuals who wish to engage in bona fide economic activities."
"I would like to suggest that entrepreneurship has two components: passion and skill. Passion is the "fire in the belly," that all-consuming dedication which is essential to the pursuit of any worthwhile activity. Passion, however, is not enough. Skill is what makes the dream real and transforms passion into good work."
"In the field of economic development, we can expedite the transformation of good individual ideas into new or expanded businesses, only by testing both the passion and the skill of our clients and by developing their capacity for assessing their strengths and remedying their management weaknesses."
"The Trinity of Management is one of the tools we use in our counselling work with clients. It simply states that to run business, no matter how small, the proponent has to be in control of three areas of activity: production, marketing and financial management."
"The Trinity of Management states that it is impossible for one individual to run a business successfully because what it takes is not only to be skilled in the three areas of competence but to be equally passionate in all of them."
"Now guess what, we have never met a single human being in the world who passionately equally loves to produce the product, market the product and keep the books. We have never met a marketing person who is also a passionate financial manager, never."
"Do you really have people in your community right now who need somebody to talk to them about their dreams. I am telling you that right now, in your community there is somebody scribbling figures on a kitchen table. And this is my promise to you. My promise to you is that if you would learn to help one person in your community go from the solitude and frustration to be able to feed herself or himself and employ somebody and look up in peoples eyes, because they now have some self respect, if you do it only once you will change forever the fortune of your community. You know why? Because there will be a ripple; success, breeds success."
"What is your passion, if your passion is go fishing, go and fish. Do it beautifully, but remember to find somebody that absolutely passionately loves to market, you have to find somebody who is absolutely passionate about financial management."
Gordon McVie
(Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"Creating enterprising communities; culture before structure? I have to be upfront at the beginning and say that I favour the culture. It doesn't mean to say that they are mutually exclusive; but I think if we don't have the culture, no amount of structure or infrastructure is going to deliver for you."
"We believe that that a strong economy and a strong society are two sides of the same coin. Enterprise and wealth creation can lie at the heart of reviving communities with the social economy and third sector also playing key roles, but this requires individuals willing to learn and relearn, for businesses to be smart, and government to listen and learn."
"But we have said that entrepreneurship is about innovation, it is about doing things differently, and we have heard a lot about that today. It is opportunity driven, it is about new markets, new technologies, new methods."
"The number one priority is greater entrepreneurial dynamism and creativity."
"What we say is that everyone has the capability of being more entrepreneurial, more enterprising, its all about learning."
"What it has demonstrated is that leading entrepreneurs are very quick learners. In fact some of them are just in time learners. They learn because they have to and it is the most immediate need that they have."
"In my view, learning and enterprise are indivisible."
"You can be an entrepreneur even though you are not self employed. You can be a corporate entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur and entrepreneur, and we need to encourage that within organisations."
"We won't call it enterprise education; it is about introducing people to enterprise."
"Life long learning, employability, entrepreneurship, and the one I think is probably most important of all: Attitude is Everything."
"When we are developing our enterprising communities we have to emphasise the whole time that we are developing that positive 'can-do' attitude, irrespective of where you are coming from or where you are going to."
"Raising aspirations is a key element of developing enterprise culture"
"Because creating enterprising communities requires a sustained effort and a multi-agency approach, the seeds of enterprise have to be sown at the earliest possible age and nurtured for each stage in an individual's development"
Change
"In times of change it is the learners who inherit the future. Those who have finished learning find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
(Eric Hoffer)
"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world when half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20."
(Arthur C Clarke)
"We can either be victims of change or we can plan for it, shape it, and emerge stronger from it. The choice is ours."
(Sonaran Institute)
"We need to accept change, and make it our friend."
(Robert Theobald)
"Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
(George Bernard Shaw)
"At every crossing on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand appointed to guard the past."
(Maurice Maeterlinck)
Sustainable Development
"Sustainable communities achieve and retain improvements in the quality of life enjoyed by other communities, now and in the future."
(Lamont Hempel)
"In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
(Great Law of the Iroquois Indian Confederation)
Participation
"Communities can often be compared to an Australian Rules Football match where 30,000 people who need the exercise watch 36 players who don't."
(Peter Kenyon)
"As a rule of thumb, involve everyone in everything."
(Tom Peters)
"Much hard evidence has accumulated that civic engagement and social connectedness are practical preconditions for better schools, safer streets and even healthier and longer lives."
(Robert Putnam)
"Volunteering has consistently been identified in the study as a critical factor of the future success of rural and regional communities. It has been the single most important factor in people feeling good about their communities, and hence working for their community's greater success."
"Yet the rate of volunteering is declining at a time when it is most needed. Older volunteers are burning out and younger people are being discouraged from participating by the prevalence of barriers that make them feel negative about their communities."
(Regional Women's Advisory Council - "The Success Factors Managing Change in Regional and Rural Australia")
"I saw an incredible study the other day about why people volunteer within their community and 82% of people said because someone asked, pretty basic stuff. It seems to me so often we get preoccupied with the big factory stuff, we forget about some of the very simple juices that make these communities and regions happen."
(Peter Kenyon Regional Development
Conference, 2001)
Seizing Opportunities
"Opportunities multiple as they are seized."
(Sun Tzu)
"People who are only good with hammers see every problem as a nail."
(Abraham Maslow)
"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door."
(Milton Berle)
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but having new eyes."
(Marcel Proust)
"Every living person has some gift or capacity of value to others. A strong community is a place that recognises these gifts and ensures they are given. A weak community is a place where lots of people can't or don't give their gifts."
"Every single person has capacities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capacities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given."
(John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann)
Leadership
"Given the task of rejuvenating a region and the choice of $50 million, or $2 million and 20 committed local leaders, we would choose the smaller amount of money and the committed leaders."
(McKinsey and Company (1994) "Lead Local Compete Global: Unlocking the Growth of Australia's Regions")
"Appoint CEOs who are the Chief Energising Officer."
(Peter Kenyon, Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"I think all we have to do is to think of what you like to do and then do it. You can be as bold as you like in whatever you are going to think about."
(Peter Kenyon, Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"What we increasingly see at the heart of regional development is leadership and unless we begin to invest in leadership and in the renewal of leadership, develop strategies, and create leadership budgets in their communities, you aren't going to see much change."
(Peter Kenyon, Regional Development
Conference, 2001)
"The other development that is happening in may of our regional development authorities are beginning to see the importance of mounting, at the regional level, a high powered, well resourced, leadership programme."
(Peter Kenyon, Regional Development Conference, 2001)
For example:
GOULBURN MURRAY COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP PROGRAM
Fosters the development of a vigorous network of community leaders by:
- offering groups of emerging leaders an intensive annual program which explores the major issues confronting the region;
- promoting an environment where emerging leaders from a range of backgrounds can develop mutual understanding and respect;
- enabling emerging leaders to meet and learn from existing leaders from within and outside the region;
- combining emerging leaders and existing leaders as a continuing resource of skills and influence to further enrich the regional community.
Planning and Evaluation
"The only way to predict the future is to invent it."
(Alan Kay)
"The future is not a place to which we are going, it is a place we are creating. The paths to the future are not found, but made and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination."
(John Schaar)
"Nau I whatu te kakahau, he taniko taku - the cloak is woven before the ornamental border is added."
"You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
(Yogi Berra)
"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
(Henry Ford)
"He manga wai koia kia kore e whitikia - It is a big river indeed that cannot be crossed"
"Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."
(Alfred North Whitehead)
"There is nothing so powerful in all the world as an idea whose time has come."
(Victor Hugo)
"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."
(Mark Twain)
"Sooner or later all thinking and planning has to degenerate into work."
(Peter Drucker)
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is!!"
(Jan L A van de Snepscheut)
"A little know fact is that the Apollo Moon missions were on course less than 1% of the time. The mission was composed of almost constant mid course corrections. That's also true of most business and community situations."
(James Belasco, Teaching the Elephant to Dance)
"In the long run, what a community chooses to measure, and how it is measured, has a tremendous impact on the quality of life."
(North West Policy Center, Seattle, USA)
"Indicators should be easily understood, reliable, easy/cost efficient to collect, indicative of quality and quantity and relevant to strategic policy and funding decisions."
(Jenny Wills)
Collaboration
"Ki nga whakaeke haumi - Ally yourself with those who have already banded together."
"True collaborations are not just about working together and doing essentially the same things - but rather they are about setting collective priorities, using resources in different ways, incorporating different perspectives"
(Julie White, The Trillium Foundation)
"Network, collaborate and cluster."
(One of the seven challenges of the Science and Innovation Advisory Council's report "New Zealand - Innovators to the World - Turning Great Ideas into Great Ventures", 2002)
"It's amazing how much you can get done when you don't care who gets the credit."
(Richard Hettrick)
"The reason that astronomers around the world cooperate so well together is that you cannot stand in one place and see the entire sky. We can apply this same principle to communities, organisations and departments."
(Unknown)
"Teamwork + Quirky (great) Individual Performance = Great Group."
(Tom Peters)
"Consensus is a group decision (which some members may not feel is the best decision, but which they can all live with, support, and commit themselves not to undermine), arrived at without voting, through a process whereby the issues are fully aired; all members feel they have been adequately heard; in which everyone has equal power and responsibility, and where different degrees of influence by virtue of individual stubbornness or charisma are
avoided so that all are satisfied with the process."
(M Scott Peck, in "A World Waiting to Happen")
"Lessons from Geese
Fact 1: As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an 'uplift' for the bird following. By flying in a "V" formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew along.
Lesson 1: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are travelling on the thrust of one another.
Fact 2: Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front.
Lesson 2: If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those who are headed where we want to go (and be willing to accept their help as we help others)
Fact 3: When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position.
Lesson 3: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership with people: as with geese, we are interdependent on each other.
Fact 4: These geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
Lesson 4: We need to make sure our honking from behind is encouraging and not something else.
Fact 5: When a goose gets sick or wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again or dies. They then launch out on their own, with another formation, or to catch up with the flock.
Lesson 5: If we have as much sense as geese, we too will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong."
Milton Olsen
Passion
"Passion. If your heart's not in it, get out. The sky's the limit if your heart's in it. You've got to have enthusiasm. If you haven't got enthusiasm you're buggered!"
(Tom O'Toole, Beechworth Baker)
"I think negative people should be taxed. They require an incredible amount of energy. They're like corgis nibbling at your ankles and I'm sure they exist to show us the difference between heaven and hell."
(Vicki Buck)
"Tohea, Tohea, ko te tohe I te kai - Keep on striving, as one strives for food."
"The key thing we are discovering in all of our work is that if you haven't got passion, you are stuffed."
(Peter Kenyon, Regional Development Conference, 2001)
"If you think you are too small to be effective, you've never been in bed with a mosquito"
(Anita Roddick)
"'When facing a difficult task, act as if it is impossible to fail. When going after Moby Dick, bring along the tartare sauce."
(author unknown)
"Aerodynamically the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it, so it goes on flying anyway."
(Mary Kay Nash)
"Nowadays towns are really not so different from businesses, they need to keep recreating themselves. Not so many years ago country towns were subject to general trends. They would all do well or all do badly. The picture is now very uneven. The successful towns are likely to be driven by people who are passionate and creative, who see an opportunity and go for it. You need communities with a bit of get up and go spirit. Some have it, some don't."
(Roy Powell, Centre for Agricultural and Regional Economics)
Innovation
"Wealth in the new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimisation; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown."
(Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy." Wired)
"The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out."
(Dee Hock business visionary and creator of Visa)
"Bottom line: Mistakes are not the 'spice of life'. Mistakes are life. Mistakes are not to be tolerated, they are to be encouraged. Failure is the only precursor to success."
(Tom Peters)
"The mistakes are all waiting to be made."
(Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower - Chessmaster)
"We all agree our theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?"
(Niels Bohr)
"Where do good new ideas come from? That's simple from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximise differences is to mix ages, cultures, and differences".
(Nicholas Negroponte MIT Media Lab)
"I have not failed; I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
(Thomas Edison)
"Who is to say what is impossible for it is the dreams of yesterday that are the hopes of today, that become the realities of tomorrow."
(Robert Goddard)
"Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century."
(Perelman)
"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."
(George Washington)
Talent
Hire for attitude. Train for skill.
(Tom Peters)
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