Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I didn't think I was good at anything, didn't do well in school. And then in the third grade, I was going to a public school. And the teacher was putting math problems on the board. And I said to myself - it's amazing how you can remember certain incidents at any age that made an impression - I asked myself why is she putting those up when the answers are obvious. And then I saw it wasn't obvious to anybody else in the class. So I said, "Hey, I'm good at something."
The Declaration of Independence was only partially applied for women and for certain immigrants such as the Chinese. And it wasn't applied to get rid of corporate welfare and cronyism. People who had special connections got special deals from the beginning. So all of those violations of what the Declaration of Independence expressed, have led to the problems we have today. So, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons for seven generations, or much longer. Forever.
My view on well-being and fulfillment comes from Maslow and positive psychology, and that is that you're satisfying three sets of needs. First need is physiological and safety needs: Got to satisfy those first. And the second is you got to satisfy your community needs because we're social animals, and if we don't have that, we're empty and we don't have people to share knowledge and bounce things off of, and challenge ourselves. And then the third is the idea is to find a calling.
A lot of what is done by the climate lobby is anti-science. But there is some science behind it. Like, there are greenhouse gases, and they do contribute to warming. But if you look at the last, say, 160 years, the first 80 of that period, they went up about four-tenths of a degree. And now, the second 80 that CO2 has increased by, what, 30 percent or something, it's gone up five-tenths of a degree. And there's been in the last 30 or 40 years, there's been no real increase in storms or bad weather.
So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that.
People are interested in certain ideas, in certain periods, and then that moves, and okay, now people are more interested in studying this, and there is no perfect balance, and how would you know what the perfect balance is? I mean, what does it mean to have too many Beethoven chairs and too few Stravinsky chairs? I mean, that's kind of a value judgment that isn't really based on humility. We don't know what the optimum number is, so let people figure this out on their own. People are more interested in Beethoven than Stravinsky? Great! Why would that bother me?
As an engineer, I understood that the natural world operated according to fixed laws. Through my studies, I came to realize that there were, likewise, laws that govern human wellbeing. It seemed to me that these laws are fundamental not only to the wellbeing of societies, but also to the miniature societies of organizations. Indeed, that is what we found when we began to apply these principles systematically at Koch Industries. Through our observation of how they could create prosperity in an organization, I began to systematize my beliefs into Market-Based Management.
Let's say I am a chocoholic and I eat tons of chocolate a day. A hundred thousands of tons a day. I have this craving, but I can't afford it, so I get a printing press, and I start printing money, and I print billions and billions to buy chocolate. So I create this boom in the chocolate industry, so stores are running out of chocolate. So they have demand, so chocolate makers expand. Cocoa growers expand. You create this great boom. But now the feds arrest me and shut me down. And now there is a depression in the chocolate industry. That's what happens with the monetary policy.
We needed to be uncompromising with our workforce, to expect 100 percent of our employees to comply 100 percent of the time with complex and ever-changing government mandates. Striving to comply with every law does not mean agreeing with every law. But, even when faced with laws we think are counter-productive, we must first comply. Only then, from a credible position, can we enter into a dialogue with regulatory agencies to demonstrate alternatives that are more beneficial. If these efforts fail, we can then join with others in using education and/or political efforts to change the law.